Modulate Raises $25 Million to Expand Audio-Native AI Platform
The Boston-based company said the funding will support research, engineering, developer tools and partnerships across fraud prevention, voice-agent oversight, customer experience and trust and safety.
Modulate raised $25 million in a funding round led by Future Ventures, giving the Boston-based audio-AI company additional capital to expand its models, engineering, developer tools and commercial partnerships.
Hyperplane and Lakestar participated in the round, which Modulate announced Sept. 28 and brings its total funding to $60 million. The company said it will increase spending on artificial intelligence and machine-learning research, product development, engineering, developer relations and partnerships.
Modulate’s flagship Velma platform analyzes audio for emotion, tone, intent, emphasis, synthetic speech and conversational behavior. The company said its models process more than 10 million hours of audio each month and have processed more than 600 million hours in total.
“Voice is becoming a primary interface for AI, and that creates a whole new set of problems that can't be solved from a transcript,” Carter Huffman, CEO and co-founder of Modulate, said.
Velma uses Modulate’s Ensemble Listening Model architecture, which coordinates more than 100 specialized audio models. The company describes the system as combining spoken words with acoustic signals such as emotion, prosody, timbre and background noise.
Modulate said Velma delivers up to two times greater accuracy and seven times fewer false positives than traditional large-language-model approaches for audio tasks. Its transcription API costs $0.03 per hour for batch processing, the company said.
Modulate also said its deepfake-detection technology achieved 98.9% accuracy on public benchmark data and ranked first on Hugging Face’s deepfake speech benchmark. The company released Velma through a developer API in June for real-time analysis of emotion, intent, behavioral risk and conversational context.
The new funding will support applications in fraud prevention, voice-agent monitoring, customer experience and trust and safety.
“Modulate has gained a significant technical lead in audio-native AI, and the market opportunity is expanding quickly,” said Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and a Modulate board member.
