Sonantic, the British provider of the world’s most expressive and realistic artificial voices, has today announced a €2.3 million funding round, led by the EQT Ventures fund.
Existing investors including Entrepreneur First, AME Cloud Ventures, and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures also participated in the round.
Founded in London 2018 by two technologists that specialise in speech — Zeena Qureshi (CEO) and John Flynn (CTO) — Sonantic aims to disrupt the global game and entertainment voice industry.
The investment will be used to grow Sonantic’s London-based team, building the company’s professional tool that enables game developers to access expressive, realistic voice acting on-demand.
Sonantic already has R&D partnerships underway with more than 10 AAA game studios, with plans to expand its offering to more games studios globally and use the funds to attract additional talent for Sonantic’s library of voice assets.
Voice acting in game development remains slow, expensive and labour intensive. It requires casting, contracts, scheduling, recording, directing and editing.
Games developers go through several iterations of the voice workflow, often due to poor quality text-to-speech (TTS) tools used in the early stages, and changing just a single line of dialogue is time consuming and costly. Currently, AAA game studios spend millions on voice processes alone.
“We believe in the saying, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” said Zeena Qureshi, CEO and co-founder at Sonantic.
“We’re teaching computers to speak the same way I taught children, with high levels of expressivity. Many TTS providers sound robotic because they don’t focus on the details that make voice truly human — breath, pitch, intonation, pacing, intensity, emotion, and variety.
“By reducing the cost and iteration time associated with voice acting, we’re enabling new creative possibilities for game developers and this is just the start. Sonantic is creating a new way for actors to work and entertainment studios to optimise performance. We’re excited to have EQT Ventures on board for the journey ahead.”
“The impact of fully human-quality artificial voices will be profound. Sonantic provides that, with the granular control needed not just for video games and animated content, but for every voice-enabled digital touchpoint,” said Ted Persson, Partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures.
“The opportunities for Sonantic’s human-sounding voices in the entertainment industry and beyond are endless and the EQT Ventures team is blown away by what Sonantic has built. We’re looking forward to supporting the team as they scale.”