A new venture capital fund for conversational AI and voice technology, called Project Voice Capital Partners (PVCP), will launch on January 1 as a rolling fund as opposed to a more traditional static model is. Bradley Metrock of Project Voice and his partner Marc Ladin, general of VoicePunch VC, are co-founders of PVCP. They plan to use the fund to find and support early-stage startups working on a wide range of language technologies, including synthetic media and generative AI.
PVCP Funding
In addition to Metroc and Ladin, PVCP’s founding venture partners include Adam Cheyer, co-founder of the companies that became Apple’s Siri and Samsung’s Bixby voice assistants, and venture capitalist Cinta Putra. Neil Jacobstein, Chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University, also participated as a technical advisor. PVCP opened the doors of its rolling fund to investors in January, with a four-quarter minimum requirement of $12,500 for him, plus administration and administrative fees. The rolling model allows subscribers to dive into any quarter and participate in all of PVCP’s deals, rather than deciding from different funds. PVCP does not have to bring in large amounts of cash at once and works at the individual investor level.
“Companies dealing with language, whether spoken or written, voice-only or multimodal and visual, along with various adjacencies (generative AI with natural language processing, etc.) are a big part of our transaction flow. With Microsoft’s $20 billion acquisition of Nuance and a number of recent successful exits, the startup ecosystem in this emerging technology space is vibrant and full of potential.”Project Voice Capital Partners The Rolling Fund targets investments in companies valued at less than $25 million, with most investments in the $50,000 to $500,000 range.”
The group will select a minimum of three startups each quarter to fund, and has already selected the first few before the official launch. Applied Brain Research, an edge-based voice technology startup, and Aug X Labs, a synthetic media startup, are leveraging generative AI and natural language processing to transform audio into videos for their enterprise marketing.
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