Today, Amberscript, the AI speech recognition startup, announced that it has raised €8.65 million to further its mission of making all audio accessible. The Series A funding round was led by Endeit Capital, a leading German-Dutch growth capital firm founded by former executives of the media company Endemol, validating the potential for Amberscript’s technology in the media industry.
Amberscript aims to make the power of language accessible to everyone and to bring the world closer together. By combining domain-specific AI speech recognition engines with a ‘human layer’ of transcribers, Amberscript produces subtitles with the highest accuracy in the market, delivered eight times faster than traditional manual methods.
This offering is particularly valuable for the many media companies, governments, and educational institutions such as universities, which are legally obligated to make their audio and video content accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.
Amberscript was founded in 2017 by Peter Paul de Leeuw and by Thomas Dienste and Timo Behrens who believe in the strength of intelligent empowerment and diversity. Amberscript is also home to 40 employees from more than a dozen nationalities speaking over 25 languages. With the strategic support of Endeit Capital, the startup will accelerate the development of best-in-class products, and continue rolling out reliable and high performing solutions that are easily accessible for everyone.
Peter-Paul de Leeuw, founder and CEO at Amberscript, explains, “Our mission at Amberscript has always been clear: provide high-quality subtitles and transcriptions to make all audio accessible. Yet, with an average university producing over 50 hours of video every day, it is physically impossible to transcribe and format the volume of subtitles needed in a fully manual way. So, we’ve spent the last three years hiring the best people and building the best technology to allow us to automate and optimise this process as much as possible. Now, we’re ready to scale.”
Amberscript is already on its way to fulfilling that mission. The young company, operational since 2018, counts various arms of both German and Dutch governments, universities, public television broadcasters and companies like Disney and Puma amongst its clients. Last month, the team announced its latest innovation, AI subtitle formatting: in-browser automatic transformation of transcripts (text only) to subtitles (text formatted to readable subtitles) using Amberscript’s AI to meet standards of the likes of Netflix and the BBC with no manual input.
Hubert Deitmers, Managing Partner at Endeit Capital, explained, “During my time at Endemol, I witnessed rapid changes across the industry with regard to subtitling ac This industry is continuing to accelerate today thanks to drastic advances in artificial intelligence. Amberscript’s AI subtitling technology is already world-leading, and its team has the talent and ambition to become market leaders – its potential within the media industry is immense.”
