The round was led by Future Ventures with participation from Hyperplane and Lakestar. Data from PitchBook indicated that the startup had raised $41 million in funding at a $170 million valuation prior to this round.
Modulate was founded in 2017 by Mike Pappas and Carter Huffman, who met as MIT physics undergrads. In its early days, the company focused on providing voice modulation for gaming, before developing a voice-based moderation tool. With the rise of voice AI models, the company is now concentrating on detecting different sorts of AI audio generation and analysing the intent behind a person's words.
"Our insight into the voice AI space is that a lot of folks are doing transcription, but there's not really any capability out there that gets the full nuance and full understanding of a conversation, which is so important when you're talking to another human being," Huffman said on a call with TechCrunch.
The company today runs more than 100 models, largely categorised into two sections. Signal extraction models are designed to understand vocal emotion, tone, language and synthetic audio.
The funding follows a popular trend among investors in the growing voice AI industry: backing companies that are trying to make AI voices sound more human. It also puts Modulate in competition with companies detecting the intent behind human conversation, and with those trying to protect people and companies from deepfake calls, as voice cloning has become easier.