EzDubs AI: Re-imagining the way we communicate globally 🌎

Hey 👋, this is the Kitsune VC Newsletter: A subset of Today in AI, where we vest a $10 million early stage fund over the next 2 years.

We make “investments” every week into early stage startups we think will make it big in hopes to beat the returns of big funds like Sequoia and a16z. 💸

We’ve just made our first Investment!! This startup is reshaping global translation, already crushing it with their twitter bot that has 340k+ followers.

The Problem: Language inaccessibility across the world 🌍

Businesses and content creators aren’t able to broadcast videos and live streams to different countries because of the language barrier. 

This way they lose out on both brand growth and revenue worldwide… 📉

Even on the consumer side, the products people can access are isolated to their geographies. 😓

This means they can’t access foreign products that could be better and yield better results. 

All because of the language barrier. 😞

Current dubbing solutions are expensive, inaccessible to smaller creators, and human-dependent. This also means they aren’t scalable.

Solution: EzDubs AI 🤖

EzDubs solves this problem with its app, which supports translation for calls, voice notes, text and even livestreams in over 30 languages. 💡

EzDubs fully automates dubbing in real-time for videos uploaded to a platform using their API.

This way human interpreters can be eliminated from the translation process, and content can be engaged with audiences worldwide. 🗺️

What's even crazier is it even replicates your emotions and tone of voice as part of the translation. 💞

This helps audiences have a more authentic viewing experience (esp. with livestreams), and helps creators grow their brands internationally.

Here’s a quick demo of how it works:

Founders 👀

The startup was founded by Padmanabhan (Paddy) Krishnamirthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi and Kareem Nassar in 2023.

Paddy and Amrutavarsh met in college at HKUST in Hong Kong. 🏫

They did a bunch of cool things here including:

• Won Asia’s largest Hackathon (hackUST) 🏅

• Interned at Uber building ML systems for driver quality control 🚗

• Built Helen AI - a wearable camera and app that read lips and translated speech into text for people with hearing loss. 👂

• Won The President’s Cup 🏆

They then moved to Columbia University in 2021 where they met Kareem who was leading Cisco’s Speech AI Group. 🧑‍🎓

Kareem worked on real-time speech AI products and even created a startup, Voicea which he sold to Cisco. 🗣️

With the shared love to use AI to improve speech, the trio started EzDubs in 2023.

They started with a dubbing model and an early version of a translation tool. With this they started a Twitter/X bot that translated clips posted on the platform. ❎

You can mention the bot under a video and have it translate any video into another language.

This gained a ton of traction… 🚀

The bot has over 340,000 followers and gets over 500 dub requests a day. Translated videos get 1M+ views daily. 📈

By April 2023, they officially launched EzDubs and enrolled in Y Combinator’s 2023 batch.

The startup then launched the bot on WhatsApp, but there was something annoying that kept coming up. 😖

Users had to forward a voice message to the bot, get a reply translated then send it back to the original sender. This was extremely inefficient.

This was when they decided to build an app for a much stronger communication pipeline.

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Investment Rationale 💸

I see an acquisition by Google in the ballpark of $200 million in the near future. 💰

Why?

It could definitely be used for either Google Translate, streaming on Youtube, or to optimize Google Meet. 💻

The global service translation market is worth around $40 billion. 💎For consumers, apps like Google translate are dominating, but they don’t work with calls or voice messages, yet…

EzDubs works with these forms of media and integrates into these platforms. They’re already planning to build extensions for apps like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Slack.

The startup has founders that have been in the space, and have a good track record of building & excelling. 🧱

They also have huge proof of concept and Product-Market Fit with their Twitter/X bot that gets a lot of attention everyday.

Businesses already use EzDubs to place hundreds of calls a day with an average call duration of 17 minutes. ⌛

It’s top use cases right now according to Paddy are:

1. People dating across different cultures 👩‍❤️‍👨

2. Professionals trying to communicate with locals when they travel ✈️

Y Combinator Partner Jared Friedman who also got in on the investment said that EzDubs can even remove language barriers within a company to help communicate more efficiently.

Usually there is a premium on startups incubated through YC which was the only reason I initially hesitated to make this deal. 🤝

However, VCs usually rely on ‘Power Law’ returns and I do think this investment can be at least a ten bagger - solving such a big, old issue. 💵

Deal Structure 💰

💰On December 11th 2024, EzDubs raised a $4.2 million seed at a $20.2M valuation led by Venture Highway with participation from Jared Friedman, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Applied Intuition’s Qasar Younis and more. 

We’ll be joining in on this round with $300K, making this our first “investment”. 💸

This gives us 1.48% theoretical equity in the startup. 🏛️

Just to clarify once more, none of the investments we make as part of Kitsune VC are real, we are only simulating what investments we’d make if we operated one.

This is NOT financial advice.

Rebuttal 🥊

Preet here-

Great choice to start with, it’s a no-brainer solution to a global problem.

It reminds me of MrBeast’s various dubbed youtube channels. The biggest youtuber in the world used to hire staff to manually dub each youtube video in over 12 languages. His largest channel, Mr Beast Espanol, even grew to a size beyond 23 million subscribers in itself.

Very few content creators like Mr Beast have the capital to deploy to dub every video manually in a variety of languages and it will be exciting to see an era where all media is fully accessible around the world. A funny post in Mandarin is equally funny to a consumer who only speaks Turkish.

This is a solid start to our portfolio and I am glad that Wail was able to find the YC website. I could definitely see this becoming a major tactical acquisition with all social media platforms looking to perfect their user experience. Personally, I expect acquisition hungry Amazon to come at the $800MM mark to optimize twitch.

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