According to various analysts, the global translation services market is worth around $40 billion. Within that market, enterprise services hold a large share. For consumers, apps like Google Translate and Apple Translate are mainstream, but they don't support calls or voice messages.
Y Combinator-backed EzDubs hopes to solve this person-to-person translation problem with an app that supports translation of calls, voice messages, and texts in over 30 languages.
The startup was founded in 2023 by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar. Krishnamurthy and Kinagi met during their university days in Hong Kong. During that time, they built a project to read lips and translate speech to text for people with hearing loss.
In 2021, the two moved to Columbia University and began working in video dubbing. They met Nassar in college, where he was leading Cisco's voice AI group while studying part-time for a master's degree. Nassar worked on real-time voice AI products. He went on to found a conference intelligence startup, Voicea, which he sold to Cisco. The trio officially started building EzDubs after enrolling in Y Combinator's 2023 batch with an early version of a dubbing model and translation tools.
The company first built and released a Twitter/X bot in January 2023 that translated clips posted to the platform. Mention a bot to have your video translated into another language. The bot has more than 340,000 followers, more than 500 dubbing requests per day, and translated videos are viewed more than 1 million times per day.
In July 2023, the company launched a bot on WhatsApp that allows users to translate voice messages and videos. However, the user had to forward the voice message to the bot, translate the response, and send it to the original sender. To alleviate this problem and build a stronger communication pipeline, the company decided to build an app and released an early version this year.
“Our partners at Y Combinator told us that communication platforms will have a bigger downstream impact than video if we can solve the difficult problem of communication delays in different languages,” said Krishnamurthy, who is pursuing video dubbing. I mentioned that I chose to build a communication app instead of
The app, available for iOS and Android, provides real-time translation of calls with support for 30 languages. Call someone who speaks another language and they'll instantly translate it for you. The person you're talking to doesn't need to have the EzDubs app to talk. This app also provides translation of text, audio and video messages.
Although users can use links to share translated audio and video messages outside of the app, the founders say platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage serve that purpose for people who communicate in multiple languages. I don't think it will work.
EzDubs noted that many people use its app to make hundreds of calls a day, with an average call length of 17 minutes. The company said people dating across cultures and professionals looking to communicate with locals while abroad are some of the top use cases.
At the core of this startup are two models. One is for cloning the voice while keeping the emotion intact, and the other is for translation. The translation model handles interruptions and starts internal translation without waiting for someone to finish writing the entire sentence.
The startup has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway, founded by former WhatsApp CBO Neeraj Arora. Other participants include Y Combinator Partner Jared Friedman, Replit CEO Amjad Massad, Replit President Michele Katasta, and Kasar Younis, CEO of self-driving car software company Applied Intuition, backed by a16z. They include Ben Fishman, CEO of cloud startup Replicate.
Friedman said the company is in the process of making translation tools easily available to users. Additionally, he believes in the product given the founder's rich history with speech and language learning.
“Access to quality translators is limited to businesses and government agencies. EzDubs is trying to democratize access to this service through its app,” Friedman told TechCrunch.
He added that there is a language barrier to effective communication even within a company, but EzDubs can remove that.
The company will soon launch a feature where you can scan a QR code and start an EzDubs call instantly without downloading an app. The founders said apps like Google Translate have a real-time mode, but it requires a lot of back and forth phone calls for it to work. The startup eventually wants to make EzDubs the default calling app so it can handle incoming calls as well.
EzDubs also plans to build extensions for apps like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack in the coming months.