The global translation service market is worth around $40 billion, according to various analysts. Within that market, enterprise services represent a significant share. For consumers, apps like Google Translate and Apple Translate are dominating, but they don’t work with calls or voice messages.
Y Combinator-backed EzDubs wants to solve this problem of person-to-person translation through its app, which supports translation for calls, voice messages, and text in over 30 languages.
The startup was founded in 2023 by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar. Krishnamurthy and Kinagi met during college in Hong Kong. During that time, they built a project that read lips and translated speech into text for people with hearing loss.
In 2021, the duo moved to Columbia University and started working on video dubbing. They met Nassar at university, who was leading the company’s Speech AI Group while studying part-time for a master’s degree. Nassar worked on real-time speech AI products. He later created a meeting intelligence startup, Voicea, which he sold to Cisco. The trio officially started to build EzDubs after enrolling in Y Combinator’s 2023 batch with a dubbing model and an early version of a translation tool.
The company first built a Twitter/X bot that translated clips posted on the platform and released it in January 2023. You can mention the bot and get it to translate a video into another language. The bot has more than 340,000 followers and gets more than 500 dub requests per day, with translated videos getting over a million daily views.
In July 2023, the company launched a bot on WhatsApp that allowed users to translate voice messages and videos. However, the user had to forward a voice message to the bot, get the reply translated, and send it to the original sender. To ease this problem and build a stronger communication pipeline, the company decided to build its app and released an early version this year.
“Partners at Y Combinator told us that if you can solve the hard problem of communication latency in different languages, a communication platform would have much more downstream effect than video,” Krishnamurthy noted about opting to build a communication app rather than pursuing video dubbing.
The app, available on iOS and Android, offers real-time translation for calls with support for 30 languages. You can call someone who speaks another language and get an instant translation. The other person doesn’t need to have the EzDubs app to talk. The app also offers translation for text, voice, and video messages.
While users can share translated voice or video messages outside the app with a link, the founders believe that for folks who communicate in multiple languages, platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage don’t serve the purpose.
EzDubs noted that many people use its app to place hundreds of calls per day, with an average call time of 17 minutes. The startup said that people dating across cultures and professionals trying to communicate with locals while staying abroad are some of the top use cases.
At the core, the startup has two models: one for voice cloning while keeping the emotions conveyed intact, and another one for translation. The translation model handles interruptions and doesn’t wait for someone to finish a whole sentence to start translating internally.
The startup has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway, which was founded by former CEO of Indian gifting company IGP Rahul Garg and ex-WhatsApp CBO Neeraj Arora. Other participants include Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition’s CEO Qasar Younis, and a16z-backed cloud startup Replicate’s CEO Ben Firshman.
Friedman noted that the company is on the road to making translation tools easily available to users. Plus, he believes in the product, given the rich history of founders being involved in speech and language learning.
“Access to high-quality translators has been limited to corporates and government entities. EzDubs is trying to democratize access to this service through its app,” Friedman told TechCrunch.
He added that even within a company, there are language barriers to communicating efficiently, and EzDubs can remove that.
The company is soon launching a feature that allows a person to scan a QR code and initiate an EzDubs call instantly without downloading the app. Founders said that while apps like Google Translate have a real-time mode, you have to pass the phone back and forth for that to work. The startup eventually wants to make EzDubs a default phone calling app so it can also handle incoming calls.
In the coming months, EzDub also plans to build an extension for apps like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack.
