Amsterdam’s Amberscript raises €8.65M to transform audio and video to text and subtitles using AI

Amberscript, an Amsterdam-based AI speech recognition startup, has announced that it has raised $10M (approx €8.65M) in its Series A round of funding. The company is building SaaS solutions that automatically transform audio and video into text and subtitles using speech recognition.

The raised capital will help the company to accelerate the development of its products, and continue rolling out reliable and high performing solutions that are easily accessible for everyone.

Investor

The round was led by Endeit Capital (Parcellab, BUX), a German-Dutch growth capital firm founded by former executives of media company Endemol.

Hubert Deitmers, Managing Partner at Endeit Capital, explains, “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.”

Endeit Capital’s investment in Amberscript is part of the firm’s strategy to boost scale-ups across Europe and follows the approx $300M fund (approx €259.6M), Endeit Capital III, which closed in April.

Create text and subtitles from audio or video

Founded in 2017 by Peter-Paul de Leeuw, Thomas Dieste, and Timo Behrens, Amberscript has created a specialised AI-enabled speech-to-text engine to ease the efforts of manual transcription. Its SaaS software enables users to automatically transcribe audio and video into text using speech recognition.

Peter-Paul de Leeuw 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.”

Currently, Amberscript has 40 employees from more than a dozen nationalities speaking over 25 languages.

The company claims to produce subtitles with the highest accuracy in the market, delivered eight times faster than traditional manual methods. The platform is used by journalists, scientists, students, doctors, lawyers, and many others all over the world.

Since 2018, Amberscript 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 startup 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.