Cisco acquires translation startup EzDubs

Summary

Networking giant Cisco has acquired EzDub, a Y-Combinator-backed consumer startup that provides real-time translation services. Cisco announced the acquisition over the weekend, but the company didn’t disclose the size of the deal. EzDubs was founded by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar in 2023. Notably, Nassar had previously worked at Cisco’s Speech AI group before co-founding the startup. The company raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway, which was founded by Neeraj Arora, who was previously WhatsApp’s chief business officer. Other investors in EzDubs include Replit CEO Amjad Masad; Replit President Michele Catasta; Qasar Younis, who is CEO of the autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition; and Ben Firshman, CEO of the cloud startup Replicate (which was itself acquired by Cloudflare in a deal that was announced on Monday). Cisco said it plans to integrate EzDubs’ tech into its communication platform, Cisco Collaboration, which spans hardware and software. This means users can get features like live translation in products like Webex video calling and messaging. Cisco’s blog post also indicated that it could make the translation tech — which preserves the speaker’s original voice — available to partners and developers. “The EzDubs team will join Cisco Collaboration, working side-by-side with our product, engineering, and go-to-market teams. Together, we will chart a new course for the industry, one where AI doesn’t just support collaboration, but truly empowers it,” Snorre Kjesbu, SVP of Collaboration at Cisco, said in the post. Cisco didn’t clarify whether all members of EzDubs’ team are joining the company. We have asked the company to clarify and will update the story if we hear back. EzDubs is sunsetting its consumer apps, which supported call translations for more than 30 languages, by December 15. “From launching the world’s first video dubbing tool that garnered millions of views on X (fka Twitte...