Modulate, a Boston-based frontier audio AI company, has announced a new funding round led by Future Ventures that brings its total funding to US$60 million. The company will use the capital to expand its audio-native models, developer ecosystem, and partner network. The investment follows rapid growth, with Modulate now analyzing more than 10 million hours of audio each month and more than 600 million hours in total.
Funding to Advance Audio Intelligence
The new capital will increase investment across AI and machine learning research, product and engineering, developer relations, and partnerships. Modulate also plans to broaden the APIs, models, and deployment options available to developers. This expansion addresses rising demand from companies building voice applications across security, customer experience, communications, AI agent supervision, and trust and safety.
Technical Momentum Behind Velma
Modulate's flagship Velma platform is designed to understand conversations with 2 times greater accuracy than traditional large language models when detecting true positive results and 7 times fewer false positive results. Velma analyzes audio directly to identify emotion, tone, intent, emphasis, synthetic speech, and conversational behaviors. These signals can be used independently or composed to recognize higher-level events, from fraud attempts and AI agent failures to harassment, customer dissatisfaction, and policy violations.
Ensemble Listening Model Architecture
The technology behind Velma is Modulate's Ensemble Listening Model, or ELM, architecture, which brings together more than 100 specialized models. This approach delivers sophisticated audio understanding with dramatically less cost and compute than traditional large models. Modulate recently earned the number one position on Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard for transcription and currently ranks first on Hugging Face's deepfake speech benchmark.
Real-World Voice AI Applications
Modulate's voice-native technology is already used to protect healthcare institutions from deepfake hackers and to improve emotion and empathy in voice AI agents. It also helps reduce extremism and harassment on social platforms, detect child grooming in voice conversations, and mask voices of agents in high-risk scenarios. Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and board member of SpaceXAI, said Modulate has gained a significant technical lead in audio-native AI and that the market opportunity is expanding quickly.
Developer and Partner Growth
The funding will support Modulate's growing developer and partner strategy through new industry models, expanded SDKs and APIs, increased developer relations resources, and new partner integrations. The company is also supporting additional deployment environments for customers. Carter Huffman, CEO and co-founder of Modulate, said developers should not have to rebuild the audio intelligence layer every time they create a new voice experience.
Building the Understanding Layer for Voice AI
Huffman added that voice is becoming a primary interface for AI, creating problems that cannot be solved from a transcript. Modulate is using audio-native AI to detect deepfake attacks, help voice agents understand emotion, identify dangerous behavior, and monitor agent performance. Underlying these applications are more than 100 specialized models working together to understand audio with less cost and compute than traditional large models.
With the new capital, Modulate is scaling its team, technology, and developer ecosystem to make audio-native intelligence a foundational layer wherever voice AI is built. The company's models are already applied across AI agents, fraud and deepfake detection, customer experience, and trust and safety. As voice becomes a primary interface for AI, Modulate aims to provide the understanding layer that helps machines interpret what is really happening in human conversations.