Bengaluru-based startup Neural Garage is setting its sights on the big screen in both India and Hollywood, as it prepares to open an office in Los Angeles, the US and launch a fresh fundraising round.
The startup, which offers visual dubbing technology for ad films in 12 languages, plans to raise $5 million in the coming months to fuel its expansion.
Started during the Covid-19 pandemic over numerous Zoom calls, Neural Garage’s core technology uses artificial intelligence to facilitate visual dubbing. Visual dubbing synchronises an actor’s lip movements with audio dubbed in another language, making it appear as if the actor is speaking the dubbed language.
A recent example of this technology in action is Ultratech’s brand campaign featuring Shahrukh Khan. The ad, originally shot in Hindi, was released in multiple languages using visual dubbing, making it seem like the actor was delivering the ad copy in different languages.
“We came up with this idea during the pandemic when we were all consuming loads of content, often in multiple languages. The visual inconsistency between the dubbed voiceover and the actors’ lip movements was the trigger for the idea,” said company’s co-founder & CEO Mandar Natekar.
The other co-founders are Subhashish Saha, Subhabrata Debnath and Anjan Banerjee.
The team then developed the technology and filed patents for it in India, North America, and Europe. Their AI-powered system works by matching phonemes (the basic acoustic units of speech) to corresponding visemes (the facial muscle movements associated with each sound).
“Every sound corresponds to a distinct facial movement. Our technology uses the sound as a cue to match the facial muscle movements so that the sound and video are in sync,” Natekar explained.
He added that with increasing screen resolutions and more global access to content, ensuring audio-visual sync has become critical to the viewing experience. As audiences experiment with content in different languages, the technology has significant potential to scale.
“We are not only looking to constantly sophisticate the core technology but also productise it. We want to eventually adopt the license model where clients can take the license for the tech, and deploy it during their post production process,” he said.
Neural Garage currently has 27 employees and has raised $1.45 million to date.
“The next three months will see us participating in AWS and Google’s accelerator programs and presenting our work at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. We are one of five startups from Asia selected to showcase our technology at the event,” Natekar said.
Neural Garage will be part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, where 200 early-stage startups from around the world will showcase their technology and pitch to potential investors.
The startup was also recently selected as one of seven Indian companies for AWS’s Generative AI Accelerator program, a 10-week initiative that provides access to AWS technology and investor networks, along with $1 million in AWS credits. These credits can be used to access AWS tools, such as GPUs, to enhance testing.
In July, Neural Garage took its first step toward the big screen by partnering with UFO Moviez. The digital cinema distributor will offer Neural Garage’s visual dubbing technology to its studio partners during post-production.