Insider Brief
- Wondercraft, an AI multilingual audio content startup, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round.
- The round was led by Will Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Steven Bartlett, and ElevenLabs, which itself recently raised $80 million in Series B funding.
- The startup focuses on text-to-speech technology for the audiobook and podcast industry, offering a platform for creators and brands to produce professional audio productions in multiple languages.
PRESS RELEASE — London/January 29. 2024 — Wondercraft, an AI multilingual audio content startup, has announced it has raised USD 3m in seed round funding.
Will Ventures led the round, which was also backed by Y Combinator, Steven Bartlett, and other Angels. One notable participant: multilingual AI voice and AI dubbing startup ElevenLabs, which announced its own USD 80m Series B on January 22, 2024.
According to Crunchbase, the company raised an undisclosed amount in August 2022, also from Y Combinator, prior to the startup’s official founding and launch in beta in 2023.
Wondercraft’s offering is predicated on text-to-speech technology, with the platform vying for a spot in the booming audiobook and podcast ecosystem — more specifically, for creators and brands who want to reach audiences in different languages.
“With a technology platform that leverages hyper-realistic AI voices, seamless music and video mixing, a versatile AI script writer, and multilingual validation by human language experts, we enable creators to efficiently produce high-quality, professional audio productions at an affordable cost and in any language,” Wondercraft’s website states.
In addition to its London headquarters, Wondercraft has offices in New York and Cairo, and the company engages more than 100 “translation experts” in 15 languages, located around the world, who reportedly “edit, validate and quality assure each translation.”
Ex-Palantir engineers Dimitris Nikolaou and Youssef Rizk cofounded Wondercraft along with Oskar Serrander, a former COO at Acast and executive at Spotify and iHeartmedia.
In a press release announcing the seed round, Nikolaou credited ElevenLabs for “pioneering” a “breakthrough in human-like synthetic voices” that inspired the Wondercraft platform.
Wondercraft plans to use the investment to further build out the platform’s capabilities. As of this writing, the company has an opening for a London-based Head of Engineering, who would join the existing full-time team of six.
“A few more exciting features are still baking in the oven, and we need your help to make them a reality,” the job ad reads.
