WellSaid Labs Raises $10 M in Series A Round
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WellSaid Labs Raises $10 M in Series A Round

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Well Said Labs intends to use the funding to further AI and product development, scale go-to-market operations, and expand the workforce.

FREMONT, CA: Well Said Labs, the artificial intelligence text-to-speech technology company, recently announced a 10 million dollars Series A round led by FUSE, with participation from previous investor Voyager, along with Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and Good Friends. Given the historic year-over-year revenue increase and great client demand, the Series A was oversubscribed with VC interest. Well Said Labs intends to use the funding to further AI and product development, scale go-to-market operations, and expand the workforce.

“We have added AI Voice to the toolkit of thousands of content creators and their teams,” said Matt Hocking, CEO, Well Said 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.”

Well Said Labs 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, with a mission to offer businesses and brands the highest quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) service imaginable.

“Plain and simple, Well Said is the future of content creation for voice,” said Cameron Borumand, General Partner at FUSE. “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 Well Said journey.”

Well Said Labs have redesigned TTS to address the most difficult content development challenges businesses face and provide an easier approach for content creators—big or small—to create all of their desired material in one consistent voice that represents their brand. The Voice Avatar library from Well Said Labs gives anyone access to various read styles and tones that can be utilized in the performances. Brands may also develop their own AI Voice Avatars to their specifications, capturing the likeness, style, and distinctiveness of the voice required to deliver their messages in the most effective way possible.

“Content creators or product experience designers were previously faced with difficult tradeoffs between quality and scalability when using TTS tools or human voiceover. Well Said’s incredible voices, which are accessible through a studio application or a scalable API, removes the need to choose whether you want natural, lifelike speech or infinitely scalable and easily editable voice content. Well Said provides both and delivers it however your team would like to consume it,” said James Newell, Partner at Voyager Capital. “Creative teams have found it to be extremely useful when they need to produce multiple pieces of high-quality content in a consistent voice in hours instead of weeks.”

In the field of AI, creating natural-sounding speech from text is a “grand challenge” that has been a research aim for decades. Well Said Labs has consistently researched and made remarkable advancements in the quality, speed, and reliability of neural text-to-speech systems during the last three years. TTS from Well Said Labs was the first to reach human parity for naturalness across numerous voices on short audio snippets in June 2020.

“Recent developments in TTS technology using generative AI have enabled synthetic voices to sound very human-like, finding exciting new applications for voice including e-learning, advertising and news readers,” said Carlos Kokron, Vice President at Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and Managing Director at Qualcomm Ventures Americas. “Well Said Labs provides an industry leading product that generates highly accurate human-like voices. We look forward to working with Well Said Labs to help fuel the creator economy with human-parity AI voices across mobile and IoT.”

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, Well Said Labs has consistently researched and developed tremendous breakthroughs in neural text-to-speech systems’ quality, speed, and reliability. In June 2020, Well Said Labs’ TTS became the first to achieve human parity for naturalness on short audio clips across multiple voices.

“WellSaid’s team has applied deep technical expertise to build a platform that enables easy creation and editing of incredibly lifelike audio,” said Dave Gilboa of Good Friends and co-CEO War by Parker. “We see meaningful growth potential in the use of high-quality audio in giving brands the ability to communicate with customers and creators the ability to engage with audiences.”

Well Said Studio removes the complications that standard text-to-speech technologies present to creatives, making voiceover production, updating, and publishing cost-effective and simple. Well Said Labs’ core AI engine is accessible to product developers via real-time APIs, allowing them to power digital experiences with a dependable and scalable speech infrastructure.

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