Project Voice Launches Venture Fund to Aid Speech Startups

Project Voice this week opened a venture capital fund for early-stage startups looking to advance conversational artificial intelligence and voice technologies.

Called Project Voice Capital Partners, the program is led by Project Voice CEO Bradley Metrock; Adam Cheyer, who has co-founded Siri, Change.org, Viv Labs, which created the Bixby voice assistant for Samsung, and Sentient, and Marc Ladin, founder of venture capitalist firm VoicePunch, with additional support from Cinta Putra. Investors will be required to contribute at least $12,500 a quarter for four quarters.

"Companies working with language, whether the spoken word or the written word, whether audio-only or multimodal and visual in nature, along with various adjacencies constitute the bulk of our deal flow," Metrock and Ladin said in a note to potential investors.

They called the voice and AI startup community "vibrant and full of potential."

Project Voice Capital Partners will look to invest in companies with valuations of less than $25 million, with most investments ranging from $50,000 to $500,000, according to Metrock and Ladin, who noted that the group plans to select at least three startups a quarter for funding.

The first two funding recipients are Applied Brain Research, a developer of AI that exploits temporal neural networks, and Aug X Labs, which leverages generative AI and natural language processing to convert audio into videos.