AI tech startup WellSaid Labs raises $10M to generate synthetic voices and build “voices for every brand”

As an owner, creating voiceover for all your digital content could provide another avenue to further engage with your customers and grow your business. Voiceover translation also offers more benefits compared to using subtitles or transcripts in your video. However, voiceover can be time-consuming and expensive due to the prohibitive cost of hiring a professional narration voiceover expert.

Enter WellSaid Labs, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence text-to-speech tech startup and first synthetic media service to achieve human-parity in-voice. With WellSaid technology, creators, product developers, and brands alike can now power up their stories and digital experiences with a wide variety of voice styles, accents, and languages.

Today, WellSaid Labs announced it has raised a $10 million Series A round led by FUSE, with participation from previous investor Voyager, as well as Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and GoodFriends. WellSaid Labs plans to use these funds to drive further AI and product innovation, scale go-to-market functions, and grow the team.

Founded in 2018 by Matt and Michael Petrochuck, WellSaid Labs has developed the art text-to-speech technology that creates life-like synthetic voices, from the voices of real people. The company offers businesses and brands the highest quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) service and also empowers content creators and product teams to create engaging voice content for infinite use-cases in streaming services, radio, programmatic advertising, digital marketing, and corporate training content.

In addition, creating natural-sounding speech from text is considered a “grand challenge” in the field of AI and has been a research goal for decades. Over the last three years, WellSaid Labs has consistently researched and developed tremendous breakthroughs in the quality, speed and reliability of neural text-to-speech systems. In June 2020, WellSaid Labs’ TTS became the first to achieve human parity for naturalness on short audio clips across multiple voices.

The startup has also rearchitected TTS to resolve some of the business’ toughest content development problems and deliver an easy way for content creators — big or small — to develop all their desired content in one consistent voice that represents their brand.

WellSaid Labs’ Voice Avatar library provides access to multiple read styles and tones anyone can use for their productions. In addition, brands can now create their own AI Voice Avatars to spec — capturing the likeness, style, and uniqueness of the voice needed to tell their stories in exactly the right way.

“We’ve added AI Voice to the toolkit of thousands of content creators and their teams,” said Matt Hocking, CEO of WellSaid Labs. “Our human-parity AI voice can be produced faster than real-time, and updated on-demand. Opening up new and exciting opportunities to ‘add voice’ where never before perceived possible. AI voice easily ensures every production can be created and updated efficiently at scale.”

Cameron Borumand, General Partner at FUSE, said, “Plain and simple, WellSaid is the future of content creation for voice. This is why thousands of customers love using the product daily with off-the-charts bottom-up adoption. Matt and Michael have assembled a world-class team and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be a part of the WellSaid journey.”

Congratulations to the Wellsaid team!