Papercup
Making the world’s videos available in any language
Funding stage: Series A
What is it?
Papercup automates the translations of videos, giving content creators and providers the ability to distribute their work globally without language barriers. The vast majority of the world’s video content is stuck in one language. It’s extremely costly to recruit voice actors and pay for studio time, enabling only the Netflix and the Disney’s of the world to be able to afford to turn their content into another language.
Papercup translates videos automatically and affordably, but most importantly, into expressive synthetic voices that are indistinguishable from human speech. Through Papercup’s natural, expressive and adaptive offering, content creators can maintain their brand during translation, contributing to internationalisation of entertainment and seamless interchangeability of language.
Realism is the key driver of viewer engagement. With a ‘human in the loop’, someone making sure that the quality is good enough and the auto-dubbing maintains the emotional complexity.
Why we like it
Auto-dubbing will enable the value of the video and audio translation market to expand by 100 fold. Traditional dubbing is fundamentally unscalable, yet content providers and streamers need to internationalise to be able to achieve their global ambitions.
Affordable, high quality dubbing is a game changer to open international markets to beyond the one or two content creators and media companies doing it today, and we believe this will lead to significant market expansion.
What our fund managers say
“Papercup is opening up the dubbing market to areas where it’s been completely inaccessible. If you look at the current value of the market that they’re targeting, it’s tiny, as nobody has been able to access translation. So it’s going the dramatic opening and expansion of market potential that we find pioneering.”
– Simon King – Partner
Who are we backing?
Jesse Shemen – Founder and CEO. A core part of us backing Papercup is Jesse, who was the Venture Lead at Octopus Labs. With a degree in Finance and Economics at NYU Stern, he also co-founded Deloitte Ventures.
See more on Papercup’s website here.