Nuance raises $50M to build unified audiovisual AI for natural conversation
Seattle-based startup Nuance has secured a $50 million Series A funding round to develop AI models that handle audiovisual input and output within a single system. The company aims to eliminate the latency and awkwardness associated with current chatbots, which often rely on separate components for speech-to-text, language processing, and text-to-speech. By integrating these functions, Nuance…
Key points
- Nuance raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
- The startup builds a single model for audiovisual input and output to reduce latency.
- Founders are former Apple researchers; the company is pre-product with an eight-person team.
Founded by three former Apple researchers, including CEO Fangchang Ma, the startup is currently pre-product but plans to launch a research preview later this year. The team emphasizes that their training data cannot be scraped from the internet; instead, they collect high-quality, natural audiovisual recordings from both sides of a conversation to ensure realism. The company is growing its eight-person team and preparing to hire go-to-market experts.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, Nvidia’s NVentures, South Park Commons, and Define Ventures. This investment follows a $10 million seed round led by Accel. Nuance targets enterprise use cases such as AI interviewers, sales representatives, and customer support agents, as well as consumer applications for practicing interviews or learning languages.
3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.
businessinsider.com · 13 September 2026Loading the full article…
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