The intellectual property of AI dubbing and synthetic speech platform Papercup has been acquired by listed firm RWS.
The news follows a staff exodus to Scale AI which Papercup co-founder and CEO Jesse Shemen (pictured) described as a “bittersweet moment”.
Revealing on LinkedIn recently that a large portion of the Papercup team is joining San Francisco-based Scale AI, he wrote: “The past few weeks have been a whirlwind – but I’m incredibly proud of where we’ve landed.
“While it’s difficult to see Papercup take a different path than I had imagined, I’m deeply proud of what we accomplished. We built the world’s first AI dubbing and synthetic speech platform adopted by top media brands, including Bloomberg, Sky News, and major studios.
“Collectively, our customers reached over a billion views on Papercup-translated videos. That is something I will always be proud of.
“I am forever grateful to our team, customers, investors, and my family for giving me the privilege of leading this company.
“We have so much to look forward to at Scale, the leading company building out foundational AI applications.”
Garrett Goodman, VP of sales at Papercup and also joining Scale AI, also seemed to throw the future of the London firm into doubt.
“In many ways I’m devastated,” he wrote. “This is a story that ended too soon. Papercup’s rocket ship was prepped for takeoff. But alas, this journey hasn’t gone according to plan.
“And in the midst of this, a new rocket ship presented itself. I won’t be dubbing. But I will be doubling down. New mission: AI agents.”
After Scale AI confirmed the news – and hailed the team’s deep experience in audio machine learning, localisation workflows and production-grade infrastructure – RWS moved to acquire the IP of Papercup.
RWS has an existing suite of language technologies – including Language Weaver for neural machine translation and Trados, described as a comprehensive platform for translation tasks, including editing, reviewing, and project management.
Its hybrid approach puts humans in the loop to optimise tone, pacing and accuracy – enabling video dubbing that’s both scalable and brand-consistent. It boasts 1,800 in-house linguists and a global network of over 40,000 language experts.
Papercup’s tech is known for its unique ability to reproduce a speaker’s tone, pace and emotion faithfully. The control and quality output is comparable to human dubbing by actors and artists, RWS said, at a fraction of the cost and turnaround time.
“The acquisition of Papercup’s market-leading technology marks our intention to transform all forms of enterprise content, making it easier for businesses to connect to global audiences,” said Ben Faes, CEO of RWS.
“RWS is well positioned to take this technology to its client base, given its trusted partnerships with over 80% of the world’s top brands and ability to offer a broader range of content solutions.
“Integrating this hybrid AI capability into our own solutions will enable us to capture the demand for scale and quality in this exploding multimedia content space.”