Another Synthetic Voice Startup Gets Funding

Murf AI Lands $10M

Another text-to-speech synthetic voice company landed an eight-figure funding round. Indian startup Murf AI announced $10 million in new funding led by Matrix Partners.

Murf’s founders are all IIT graduates. They told Tech Crunch that the market for synthetic voices will be $7 billion in 2028. That’s based on a 14% CAGR, so they are estimating the market at about $3.2 billion today.

It is unclear how accurate that estimate is but one thing that is clear is there are many synthetic speech companies with largish funding rounds behind them. Of the six segments of synthetic media, the audio component, which includes synthetic speech engines, is the most mature. We expect to see more of these startup funding rounds before the dust settles and consolidation ensues.

What Murf Does

Murf AI supports all of the usual suspects in terms of synthetic speech use cases. The company also pitches a voice changer, but it doesn’t appear to be a voice modulator. Instead, it takes your existing voiceover, transcribes it, and then enables you to select from one of the 120 template voices and have the text read back in a new voice. It doesn’t appear to retain any of the characteristics of the original voiceover like you will find with a company like Respeecher.

Features that do look promising enabled you to change the pitch, emphasis, speech, and other variables. These capabilities are critical to making synthetic voices sound humanlike.