Investing in Murf

As a marketing leader during my time at Freshworks, I saw the intense effort it took to produce high-quality audio/video content. Storyboard a video, write a draft script, record a scrappy version in-house, tweak the copy, pacing, and emphasis, and then go out to create the final recording. This includes hiring a voiceover artist, booking expensive studio time, and expensive do-overs. A process that takes weeks and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Enter Murf, the AI-voiceover studio that makes it easy for anyone to create high-quality speech in minutes. Murf is reinventing the $7 Billion voiceover industry by making voiceover creation faster, better and cheaper. And it puts this superpower in the hands of every content creator with a self-service product - you can sign up and give it a shot here.

While text-to-speech has been around for a while, the quality was "good enough, not great”. Use cases were limited to communicating information (think IVR and customer support). Recent advances in deep learning and AI have moved synthetic speech from the realm of communicating to acting. In fact, in the recent Top Gun movie, the voice of “Iceman” Van Kilmer was generated by AI. Nuances like emotion, emphasis, and tone bring the quality of voices generated by Murf to a standard that can’t be distinguished from human speech.

When we met Ankur, Sneha, and Divyanshu we were blown away by the technology and traction they’ve created in just 2 years. Since launch, the Murf team has added 120+ human-like voices to the platform and has been used to create over a million voiceovers. We heard from European authors converting their latest work into audiobooks with American accents, a process that usually costs $45,000, and educators creating hundreds of hours of content without being at the mercy of freelancers. We’re just scratching the surface of what's possible and are excited about wide-ranging applications including advertising, L&D, education, marketing, podcasts, audiobooks, and more.

I’m personally excited to lead the series A investment in Murf and partner with Ankur, Sneha, and Divyanshu as we build a category-leading generative AI company.

PS: At Matrix Partners India, we’ve always been excited by applied AI - the intersection of AI and business applications. AI is the third wave of transformative technology after the internet and mobile waves, and we’re very early in this journey. We’ve backed other stealth-mode AI startups (more on this soon!) and would love to hear from you if you’re reinventing large markets with AI-first applications