Murf AI raises £8.8m for AI-powered synthetic speech

Murf AI has raised $10 million (£8.8m) in Series A funding. 

The company, which was founded in october 2020 and aims to create human-like text-to-speech through an AI SaaS tool, plans to use these funds to drive further product innovation, accelerate R&D, and scale its presence in focused geographies. It follows on from $1.5 million (£1.3m) in seed funding raised in May 2021.

The funding round was led by Matrix Partners India with participation from existing investor Elevation Capital, as well as prominent angel investors such as Ajay Arora - SVP product, Disney Streaming; Ankit Bhati - founder of Ola; Ashwini Asokan - founder of Mad Street Den; Pushkar Mukewar - founder of Drip Capital; and Yamini Bhat - founder of Vymo.

Murf AI offers 120+ human-parity AI voices across 20+ languages and varied accents such as like African American, British, and Australian English.

Ankur Edkie, co-founder and CEO of Murf AI, said: “Synthetic media is poised to become omnipresent in the near future and voice is at the core of it. At Murf, we continue to make advances in our speech technology to bring the diverse abilities of talented voice actors at our customers’ fingertips through AI. This Series A investment would further bolster our commitment towards simplifying and scaling voiceovers.”

Mukul Arora, co-managing partner at Elevation Capital, added: “AI-driven, life-like voiceovers are the next frontier in the text to speech market. Murf, with their stellar founding team and unique IP, is perfectly poised to gain a leadership position in this space. Their execution prowess and tech-first focus is evident in the solid traction and growth that they’ve demonstrated so far. We are really excited to double down on our  partnership with Murf.”

Pranay Desai, principal at Matrix India, commented: “We’re big believers that AI will reinvent every market and Murf is reinventing a multi-billion dollar category with their AI-voiceover technology. Creating voiceovers is hard, and Murf’s unique IP makes it easy for every individual to create emotional and theatrical voices—faster, better, and cheaper. With phenomenal customer love and international traction, Murf is an early category leader and we’re excited to partner with Ankur, Sneha, and Divyanshu on their next phase of growth.”