LOVO raises $6.5 Million in Pre-Series A to Develop the Voice of the Web3 Ecosystem

LOVO raises $6.5 million in investment to build the voice of web3

LOVO, a synthetic voice company, has raised an additional $2 million in its pre-Series A round, raising the total amount to $6.5 million. The extension was led by Hashed, an international crypto venture capital firm active in the blockchain gaming and NFT ecosystem, which has previously invested in Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, and Decentraland, as well as PKO Investments, which is bringing on prominent angels like Yat Siu, Founder of Animoca Brands, Patrick Lee Founder of Rotten Tomatoes, Holly Liu, Founder of Kabam, Kun Gao, Founder of Crunchyroll and Ray Chan.

The funds will aid LOVO in developing new methods to connect its AI speech technology to Web 3.0. It follows the success of the Voiceverse NFT collection, which consists of 8,888 NFTs, each representing a distinct AI-generated voice. Each Voiceverse NFT unlocks a unique AI voice model that can be used to create any speech content or even utilised in real-time on voice chat services like Discord.

Voiceverse NFTs went on sale in late January 2022 and sold out in less than 10 minutes. They demonstrated the power of LOVO's synthetic speech technology by creating all 8,888 distinct voices from a seed of 100 genuine recordings. Jonny Cruz and Charlet Chung, well known for their roles in the popular game Overwatch, were among the initial voices leased from LOVO's partner voice actors. Each sale on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea pays all partner voice performers a considerable fee.

 Tom Lee, Co-Founder of LOVO, said:

With Voiceverse, people can now add another layer of personalization and pseudonymity, completing their persona for the metaverse. As a company that’s spent years researching and developing applications leveraging AI Voice & Synthetic Speech, this was a no-brainer — Voiceverse is simply a natural progression in line with LOVO’s vision and tech.

The LOVO concept, which the company pioneered, now enables voice performers to receive a significantly larger share of the earnings earned by their labour. Previously, voice actors were paid fixed rates for their job and did not earn any further compensation if the material they created generated billions of dollars in income.

Combining the unique NFTs with existing profile image NFTs and distinctive avatars like BAYC is one of the fascinating uses of voice in the metaverse. With the addition of a voice to the picture, the NFT becomes a totally complete digital avatar, thanks to advancements in AI technology.

In the future, LOVO wants to collaborate with crypto games and Metaverse worlds to allow users to create their virtual identities using Voice NFTs and mint new Voice NFT collections featuring well-known celebrity voices.

What is LOVO?

LOVO, Inc. is a next-generation synthetic speech platform for use in education, marketing, entertainment, and the creation of audio material in general. A group of U.C. Berkeley AI and machine learning scientists started the startup. The site is used by over 40,000 people in 41 countries, who have created over 3 million pieces of speech content so far. The startup has collaborative ties with Google, Intel, NVIDIA, AWS, and LG CNS as a Berkeley SkyDeck alum.

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Image credits: Panos Sakalakis.