“There is plenty of content available for the English-speaking audience, but in the non-English language, which is 90%+ for India, the content is not enough for the children to learn and keep up with the competitive landscape,” said Anuja Dhawan, Co-Founder at Dubverse.ai, about the reason behind choosing online video dubbing using artificial intelligence as the path to walk on.
Varshul, Founder at Dubverse, and Anuja joined during the pandemic to break the language barrier in online videos for students and many others who needed it. Google has acknowledged Anuja and her team to be in the top 20 Indian start-ups in the tech giant’s Accelerator program, which was for Women-led businesses.
Sharing her entrepreneurial journey with Business Upside India, Anuja talked about the key to making a business grow fast and survive in the competitive market, using AI, and her future visions with Dubverse.ai.
Edited Excerpt of the Interview:-
Business Upside [BU]: How does it feel to be acknowledged by Google?
Anuja Dhawan [AD]: It is a brilliant feeling to be selected from the 400 applications and be in the top 20. We bring in the deep-tech space alignment with Google accelerates our journey. The Google team has put in tremendous efforts in the whole process, from inviting us to their office for a week to making sure of the fun activities; the benefits from the program are countless. We are delighted to be a part of the cohort; this has already benefited us in the short term by getting the right connections, converting fellow founders into users for Dubverse, and making long-lasting friendships; the program is a mixed bag of professional and personal development.
[BU]: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
[AD]: The idea originated when Covid hit the world, and education had to be digitized overnight. There is plenty of content available for the English-speaking audience, but in the non-English language, which is 90%+ for India, the content is not enough for the children to learn and keep up with the competitive landscape. That’s when Varshul, founder at Dubverse, started thinking about how can the tech, specifically generative AI solve this problem at hand, he went ahead and built an MVP in less than six months to test the waters, and here we are after 1.5 years releasing over the way that this is not just educational problem but an overall internet issue and needs to be resolved at scale.
[BU]: What is the key for your company to grow so fast?
[AD]: It is the pull from the market. The Demand for vernacular is sky-rocketing since the Internet has become cheap and covid pushed everyone to go digital, these two facts have led Bharat to come online and experience the world of the Internet, but the Internet still does not speak their language. That’s where we come into place. We enable brands/creators to repurpose their content by moving across languages, increasing their reach, and solving for the supply of vernacular content.
[BU]: Do you plan to utilize the power of AI more in the future?
[AD]: Definitely, that is the basis of our existence. Our motto is to make AI usable for creating more and more content at scalable and cost-efficient levels, where creativity can be used in building the content, and other tasks can be done by technology.
[BU]: How do you market your business, and which method has been most successful?
[AD]: We have majorly relied on organic growth so far, and it has given us pretty damn good results, people who understand the power of content and distribution are already building their channels to reach the masses by spreading their content in vernacular languages. Apart from that, we have an excellent set of investors, mentors, guides, and friends who help us out of their way and put us in the right places.
[BU]: Why should marketers, media firms, and agencies reach out to you?
[AD]: We can accelerate their vernacular journey and add much tech to their content creation workflows; we are an agile company open to experimentation and are doing break-through things in the generative AI space, we can help them do dubbing, do voice cloning, making their brand voice which is scalable with AI, generate videos at bulk and the list goes on.
[BU]: What were the setbacks you faced when you first started in the profession, and how did you overcome them?
[AD]: It is damn hard to take the number of decisions a start-up requires daily; one wrong shot and all of it goes south. Everything is so new, so grounded up, that everyone decides the organization’s future, hence keeping the team tightly aligned but empowering them to run independently is what changes the game. We have a brilliant team that understands the long and short team vision of the company and operates on the same.
[BU]: What are the two things you think start-ups should never forget?
[AD]: It is the people who make or break the start-up; never underestimate the power of people coming together and changing the world, for good or for worse.
Built real business, which adds value to people’s lives, makes it better in any way possible; it is not a rush to the funding rounds or valuations; this is our chance to make an impact and do things differently.
[BU]: What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
[AD]: The most satisfying thing has been to work day in and day out with one of my closest friends, Varshul and I have known each other for more than six years now; we have traveled together, worked together in the past, and shared a special bond over these years, and to be able to work next to each other has been a blessing.
[BU]: What is the next goal you wish to accomplish?
[AD]: We are just getting started; the Internet needs to be multi-lingual. As our next goal, we want to go deeper into the specific markets where bulk content is being created, such as News, LnD, and Explainer videos, to shorten the video creation cycle and to repurpose content at scale and in a cost-efficient manner to increase the reach of the content.
Also Read: Young Entrepreneur Anirudh Mittal Talks about His Start-up and Success Story with Business Upside
