NeuralGarage raises $1.45 million in a seed round led by Exfinity Ventures. Founded by IIT Kanpur alumni Subhashish Saha, Anjan Banerjee, Subhabrata Debnath and senior media and entertainment executive Mandar Natekar, the deeptech start-up is currently building the ‘VisualDubä’ solution to empower content creators across the board, globally.

The funding round saw participation from angel investors RAAY Global of the Amit Patni Family Office, Vishal Agarwal and Raj Kulasingam, Anand Singh of Elios and Nexus Global Fund, Sarath Sura of Sunn91 Ventures, Sachin Jain, ex-KPMG executive Narendra Soni and erstwhile Avendus executive Kejal Shah.

The start-up plans to use the funds to enhance its capabilities by investing in talent across R&D, engineering and product.

With content being dubbed in multiple languages to appeal to more audiences globally, NeuralGarage aims to eliminate the visual dissonance and loss of realism caused by dubbing due to a lack of audio-visual sync thus enabling a seamless export of language and culture.

Speaking on this state-of-the-art technology and the business opportunity, Natekar, co-founder and CEO at NeuralGarage said, “Our proprietary VisualDubä tech intends to make non-native content native, help content creators and long format platforms in localisation of content, make dubbed content look realistic and offer a delightful experience for viewers. We see this technology being adopted globally by content platforms and studios, advertising agencies, broadcasting networks, edtech platforms, and creators of L&D content. Given the nature of the technology and the fast-growing content ecosystem, VisualDubä will surely create intrinsic value and further growth.” 

"As an investment thesis, Exfinity is looking at Computer Vision + Video to solve a wide range of use cases. We already have made a few investments in this space earlier. The consumption of video content is exploding. Content also transcends all barriers be it language, culture or nation,” added Shailesh Ghorpade, founding managing partner, Exfinity Ventures.

“With the recent advancements in AI, it is imperative that it will play a crucial role in the forthcoming years by enhancing and inspiring the creation, delivery, and consumption of content across the horizon. NeuralGarage is committed to contributing to this space and establishing a stronger connection between the creator and the consumer,” said Subhabrata Debnath, co-founder and chief technology officer of NeuralGarage.

VisualDubä syncs the lip and jaw movements of a person in a video by using audio as a driver. This adds more realism visually as compared to dubbing. "It allows creators to connect to a larger audience pool with minimal effort and also provides an enhanced experience and improved comprehension for viewers,”  Debnath concluded.