Networking giant Cisco has acquired Y Combinator-backed consumer startup EzDubs, which provides real-time translation services. Cisco announced the acquisition over the weekend, but the company did not disclose the size of the deal.
EzDubs was founded in 2023 by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar. Notably, Nassar worked in Cisco’s Speech AI group before co-founding the startup. The company has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway, founded by Neeraj Arora, who previously served as WhatsApp’s chief business officer. Other investors in EzDubs include Replit CEO Amjad Maead. Replito President Michele Catasta. Kasar Younis, CEO of self-driving car software company Applied Intuition. and Ben Firshman, CEO of cloud startup Replicate (which was acquired by Cloudflare in a deal announced Monday).
Cisco said it plans to integrate EzDubs’ technology into Cisco Collaboration, its communications platform across hardware and software. This means users can take advantage of features like live translation in products like Webex video calling and messaging. Cisco’s blog post also hinted that it may make translation technology available to partners and developers that preserves the original audio of the speaker.
“The EzDubs team will join Cisco Collaboration and work alongside our product, engineering, and go-to-market teams. Together, we will chart a new direction for the industry where AI not only supports collaboration, but truly enhances it,” Snorre Kjesbu, senior vice president of collaboration at Cisco, said in a post.
Cisco did not say whether all members of the EzDubs team will join the company. We have asked the company for clarification and will update the story if we hear back.
EzDubs will shut down its consumer app, which supported call translation in more than 30 languages, by December 15th.
“From launching the world’s first video dubbing tool that garnered millions of views on X (aka Twitter) to delivering voice- and emotion-preserving real-time phone translation across over 30 languages, this journey has been extraordinary. But what truly means the most is the support, feedback, and stories you’ve shared along the way,” the startup said in a blog post.
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Several acquisitions have been made in the translation space in recent months. This month, Seven Seven Six-backed Palabra AI acquired live communications platform Talo. In July, language localization company TransPerfect acquired Unbabel, a translation startup founded in Portugal.
The EzDubs acquisition also raises the question of whether building consumer-focused translations is viable at a time when there is more money and demand in the enterprise communications market. According to various reports, the translation services market is valued at approximately $40 billion.
