Say that again? UK speech-dubbing pioneer secures new funding

A British artificial intelligence startup that has helped Sky News and YouTube stars translate their video content into foreign languages has secured £8m in funding to expand its speech-dubbing venture. Papercup, which was founded three years ago, attracted early investors including William Tunstell-Pedoe, whose business was acquired by Amazon to help develop Alexa, and Uber's former artificial intelligence (AI) chief Zoubin Ghahramani. Now it is targeting the millions of hours of content companies such as Netflix need to translate. "Most of the world's videos – billions of hours of content – are shackled to a single language," said Jesse Shemen, co-founder and chief executive of Papercup. "And that's for a simple reason, quality dubbing is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, so current solutions only work for a select group of deep-pocketed content owners.