Audio AI company Modulate has raised $25 million in additional funding to expand technology designed to identify synthetic speech, harmful conversations and other voice-based risks in real time.
The round was led by Future Ventures, with participation from Hyperplane and Lakestar. Modulate said the investment brings its total funding to $60 million.
The company develops audio-focused AI models for its Velma platform, which is intended to assess characteristics that may be missed by text transcription alone. Those signals include tone, emotion, intent, conversational behavior and indicators of AI-generated speech.
Modulate said its system combines more than 100 specialized models built on its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. According to the company, the platform processes over 10 million hours of audio per month and has analyzed more than 600 million hours in total. The company also said its transcription and deepfake-detection models have performed strongly on public benchmarks, though those claims were not independently verified in the announcement.
Focus on real-time intervention
Voice cloning and other forms of synthetic audio have become a growing concern for organizations that use call centers, voice assistants and automated customer-service systems. Fraudsters can use convincing synthetic voices in social-engineering schemes, while altered or masked voices may also complicate moderation and identity-verification efforts.
Modulate says Velma is designed to support live detection, allowing customers to respond during an interaction rather than after reviewing a recording. Potential uses cited by the company include identifying deepfake-enabled fraud targeting healthcare organizations, detecting harassment or extremist content on communications platforms, protecting vulnerable users from grooming conversations, and evaluating the behavior of voice AI agents.
The company also positions the technology as a way to help voice applications recognize emotion and improve how automated agents respond to users. Such deployments may require careful governance, particularly where systems analyze sensitive conversations or make decisions affecting users in real time.
Investment plans
Modulate said it will use the new capital to grow its team and infrastructure, broaden its model offerings, and develop additional APIs, software development kits, integrations and deployment options for developers and partners.
Chief executive and co-founder Carter Huffman said audio requires analysis beyond a written transcript, particularly as voice becomes a more common interface for AI systems. The funding reflects continued investor interest in tools intended to counter the misuse of generative AI, including increasingly accessible voice-cloning capabilities.