Modulate raises $25m to grow audio AI and music detection tool
Boston audio AI company Modulate has raised USD $25 million in new funding. The round was announced on September 28, led by Future Ventures, and takes the company's total funding to $60 million.
Existing investors Hyperplane and Lakestar joined the round, Music Business Worldwide reported. The wire-distributed release announcing the deal is titled 'Modulate Raises $25M to Scale Its Lead in Frontier Audio-Native AI'.
Modulate is best known in games for ToxMod, a voice moderation tool for live chat. In June it launched an AI music detection API, an interface that lets other companies plug its software into their own systems, marketed to streaming services and distributors.
That music product is aimed at a practical problem for the record business. Services and distributors need to know whether a track contains synthetic voices or AI-generated material, for rights checks, royalty splits and fraud controls.
The company was founded in 2017 by Carter Huffman and Mike Pappas, who met as physics undergraduates at MIT. Huffman, previously chief technology officer, has taken over as chief executive. Pappas, who was chief executive in June, has become chairman.
Modulate describes itself as a frontier audio AI company. Its audio AI platform is called Velma, and it uses an array of small models to provide enterprise customers with services including transcription, the conversion of speech into written text.
The company says its models analyse more than 10 million hours of audio a month. In total, it says they have processed more than 600 million hours.
It also puts the accuracy of its synthetic voice detection at 98.9% on public benchmark data. It says its transcription and deepfake detection models rank first on Hugging Face leaderboards, the public rankings where developers compare AI models.
PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch put Modulate's valuation at $170 million before the round. The same reporting said the company had 40 to 45 employees and planned to add 10 more in the coming months.
Modulate said the funding will go toward AI and machine learning research, product and engineering, developer relations and partnerships. Developer relations here means the staff and tools that help outside programmers adopt its systems.
What makes this stand out for music is the customer list Modulate is chasing. If streaming fraud and undeclared AI vocals are eating into recording income, a detection supplier lives or dies on whether labels, distributors and platforms trust its numbers.
