DubGuild Inc. Closes Seed Round, Selected for National AI Project GENIAC
DubGuild's selection for GENIAC and its seed round signal government and venture backing for a Japanese approach to end-to-end voice AI, a field where global competition is intensifying.
Reporting from 1 sources: ASCII.jp.
DubGuild Inc. completed a seed round led by JAFCO Group, with Coreline Ventures and CyberAgent Capital as subscribers. The company's proposal for a voice foundation model was also selected for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and NEDO's GENIAC project. Cumulative funding and support now total approximately 2.1 billion yen. DubGuild plans to use the funds to hire engineers and accelerate development of its text-free, voice-specialized large spoken language model.
DubGuild Inc. has closed a seed round led by JAFCO Group, with Coreline Ventures and CyberAgent Capital participating as subscribers. The company also announced that its proposal for a voice foundation model has been selected in the fourth public offering of GENIAC, a national project run by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and NEDO to strengthen domestic generative AI capabilities. With this funding and support programs, DubGuild's cumulative funding and support reaches approximately 2.1 billion yen.
DubGuild's mission is "Scaling Speech AI." The company is developing a text-free, voice-specialized foundation model, which it calls a Large Spoken Language Model (LSLM). The proposal aims to build a 30-billion-parameter spoken language model capable of emotion understanding, natural responses, and real-time dialogue including interruptions. DubGuild says the pipeline approach of speech recognition plus text-based LLM plus text-to-speech has limitations in emotional expression and real-time performance, and that end-to-end voice dialogue models are emerging globally.
DubGuild will use the funds to strengthen hiring of engineers and accelerate research, development, and social implementation of its voice model. The company is based in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, and is led by Representative Director Masatoshi Ohtake.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.