The voice intelligence company | MIT-alum founded. LLMs read text. We listen and understand: Try Velma 2.0.
Boston, MA
Joined August 2017
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Modulate retweeted
Building voice agents is half the problem.
Knowing what’s actually happening in those conversations is the other half.
In Atlanta for VON, demoing @modulate_ai at VoiceAI LIVE! today alongside @SoundHound and others.
2:40 PM, Room C. Come say hi. I’ll be listening to how you say it.
Modulate retweeted
I used to teach spacecraft to see.
Now I teach software to listen.
@modulate_ai recently raised $25M, led by Future Ventures, to build the listening layer for AI.
Cosmology → JPL → voice. Here’s the path 🧵
Modulate retweeted
Winnowing nuance from noise
Modulate runs over 100 voice-native models to discern emotion, tone, intent, and language, and detect synthetic and deepfake voices (ranked #1 on 🤗).
We just led their seed round; news today: techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/mo…
Product: modulate.ai/velma
We just raised $25M in new funding led by Future Ventures (@VenturesVc), with @HyperplaneVC and @lakestarvc - bringing Modulate’s total funding to $60 million.
Building the next phase of audio-native AI: more models, more developers, more of the stack that actually understands voice.
Where we stand today:
- Ranked #1 on Hugging Face for deepfake detection and transcription
- 600M+ hours of audio analyzed
- 10M+ hours analyzed every month
A foundational layer of the AI stack is getting more powerful. More soon.
Modulate retweeted
🚨 A startup just hit #1 on @HuggingFace for deepfake audio detection.
98.9% accuracy. 30–1000× cheaper than every competitor. Nobody is talking about this.
It's called Velma by @modulate_ai and it changes everything about voice security.
🤝 Paid partnership
Modulate retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Transcription just got 90x cheaper.
One of the biggest hidden costs for AI startups is Speech-to-Text.
Velma-2 by @modulate_ai just launched: $0.03 per audio hour transcribe.
Here’s why this changes everything for AI founders:
Modulate retweeted
I've built two voice pipelines for two different companies.
They both look like this:
Audio → STT → Clean transcript → NLP → Classify → Act
This works, but there's still a problem I can't solve.
Every time I convert audio to text, I'm keeping the words but throwing away the meaning. Tone, hesitation, sarcasm, and stress are all gone. I have the text, but miss its soul.
The folks at @modulate_ai reached out and showed me how to solve this.
Velma is the voice model that's been running inside Call of Duty and GTA Online to catch toxicity in real time.
This model skips the transcript entirely and works directly on the raw audio. This allows the model to take into account the "invisible clues" other models miss.
It can detect up to 150 invisible clues that none else does!
You can access Velma through an API, and it's ~10x cheaper than pushing audio through an LLM.
If you want to give it a try, use this link to get 1,000 free credits:
modulate.ai/api/velma?utm_so…
Thanks to the team for partnering with me on this post.
Modulate retweeted
The weird thing about voice AI today?
It doesn't actually understand voice.
audio → transcript → LLM
And right there, before your model sees a single token, tone, stress, hesitation, sarcasm, and intent are already gone.
You've been reasoning about conversations from their shadows.
This startup just solved this problem.
@modulate_ai built Velma to fix this.
The ONLY audio-native model of it's kind
- trained on 550M hours of raw audio
150+ behaviors detected in real time - straight from the audio, no transcript step.
Velma is already running inside Call of Duty and GTA Online.
Now it's open to every developer.
Get 1,000 free credits in the comment below 👇
🤝 Paid partnership
Modulate retweeted
8. @modulate_ai announced $25M in new funding. Its Velma platform analyzes audio directly for signals including tone, synthetic speech and conversational behavior. Agent supervision is one application.
Modulate retweeted
شركة @modulate_ai الأمريكية تجمع 25 مليون دولار لتطوير تقنيات ذكاء اصطناعي تكشف الأصوات الاصطناعية والتزييف العميق في المكالمات.
تخطط الشركة لاستخدام التمويل في تعزيز قدرتها على مواجهة الاحتيال الصوتي ودعم قواعد الامتثال في القطاعات المنظمة.
jawlah.co/65301
Modulate retweeted
BREAKING 🚨 @modulate_ai, cofounded by @whuffman @mpappas74, raised $25M in new funding led by Future Ventures @VenturesVc with @HyperplaneVC and @lakestarvc, to expand its audio-native AI models and developer ecosystem
Learn more: fondo.ai/47qiNfW
Modulate retweeted
ok modulate.ai is by far my fav STT service, I love building apps with their api.
Modulate retweeted
One of the most effective ways to build robust AI systems is to have them challenge each other 🤼♂️
It's tempting to think of generation and detection as two separate machine learning problems. In reality, they're part of the same feedback loop 🔁
👉 Every breakthrough in synthetic voice generation creates new edge cases for detection.
👉 Every improvement in detection exposes new limitations in generation.
Advancing one without the other leaves you with an incomplete understanding of the problem.
That's one of the reasons we've invested heavily in both at @modulate_ai.
The two systems continually push each other forward, helping us build more resilient voice AI as the technology evolves.
I'm curious - do you think the future of AI will be shaped more by specialized models solving individual problems, or by systems that continuously learn from and improve one another? 👀
Modulate retweeted
AI music is flooding streaming platforms faster than reviewers can handle, and standard detection tools can't keep up with real-world catalogs.
@modulate_ai explains how their API tackles AI music detection at scale: hackernoon.com/detecting-ai-…
Modulate retweeted
Modulate Transcribe just ranked #1 out of 84 models on @huggingface Open ASR Leaderboard.
Trained on 500M+ hours of real-world, noisy audio - and still costs $0.03/hour.
Incredibly proud of my team at @modulate_ai!
We're outperforming players with 10x our resources, on a benchmark anyone can go check for themselves. Nothing beats building the best product and letting the numbers speak.
Check out the leaderboard here: bit.ly/4b6yWK3
Modulate retweeted
How did we do it, while being literally 1000x smaller than many of our competitors? Aside from simply amazing talent, the secret is in the data. @modulate_ai got started on the hardest voice understanding problem out there - real-time understanding of video game voice chats.
That means being able to keep up with new jargon and phrasing. It means handling incredibly low-quality microphones as well as high-end headsets. It means understanding not just words but emotions, to tell the difference between friendly banter and genuine hate speech. And it means doing it all in seconds.
Others started with studio recordings, and produced technology that works in the studio. Modulate dove into real conversations, and built technology that leads the way in the real world.
Modulate retweeted
@huggingface just listed @modulate_ai as the best transcription model in the world. Best on which metric? Amazingly, nearly all of them.
We're the most accurate model. We're more than 10x *cheaper* than the runner-up models, and our models aren't just good on clear audio, but outperform on noisy, real-world content too.
Not to mention that we're the only provider that augments transcription with emotion, prosody, and behavioral understanding, to *truly* understand what's being said in a voice conversation.
huggingface.co/spaces/hf-aud…
Modulate retweeted
Everyone's seen this scene from @netflix Queen Charlotte 👀
Here's what Velma by @modulate_ai sees.
Not just the words - but emotion, sentiment, conversational behaviors, speaker dynamics, and everything else encoded in the voice.
That's the difference between transcription and TRUE voice understanding.
Welcome to Velma in the Wild.
I'll be doing this every week, putting iconic clips through the world's most powerful Voice AI to show what conversations actually sound like beyond the transcript.
What should I analyze next?
#VelmaInTheWild
Modulate retweeted
@modulate_ai has announced the launch of its new AI Music Detection model!
This launch represents a key step in helping the music industry distinguish AI-generated music from human-created content while supporting transparency across the audio ecosystem.
modulate.ai/press-releases/m…
Modulate retweeted
Most voice pipelines still look like this:
audio → transcribe → text → model → act
The problem is step one. The second you turn audio into text, you throw away tone, hesitation, sarcasm, stress. The signal that told you what the person actually meant.
So everything you built after that ran on the transcript. The actual conversation was already gone.
@modulate_ai trained Velma on 550M+ hours of raw audio to skip that step entirely. One model that listens to the audio instead of reading a summary of it.
#1 on the conversation understanding benchmark. 10x cheaper than running it through an LLM.
The part that makes this more interesting: Velma has already been running in production inside Call of Duty, GTA Online, and Fortune 500 contact centers. Now the API is open to everyone.
🤝 Paid partnership