When Weinberg junior Gannon Schram watched the Spanish television show “Money Heist,” he noticed problems with its dubbed English version.
The audio wasn’t synced to the actors’ lips. The audio of one voice actor was used for multiple characters. These experiences prompted Schram and his co-founder, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign student Shrikar Lekkala, to start MetaFrazo.
Schram co-founded MetaFrazo in 2023 at UIUC before transferring to Northwestern. The startup uses artificial intelligence to dub audio into more than 60 languages.
Once MetaFrazo had enough features to be used by early-stage customers, Schram and Lekkala sold the service to universities, including UIUC and NU.
The co-founders tested their product on college courses to receive feedback on MetaFrazo.
“We’re working with a few universities in pilot tests, dubbing a course and then sending that out to a bunch of students that speak those languages and gauging their opinions on the quality of it and whether they’d prefer that over English,” Schram said. “It’s been very positive thus far.”
The method came with challenges, such as slow sales cycles at universities, Schram said. To grow the company, MetaFrazo couldn’t solely focus on education.
The company turned to social media to draw in more users.
“It’s an incredibly slow process to try and expand, especially in education,” Schram said. “(We’re) still focusing on education, but only in 50% of our endeavors, and the other 50%, we’re now focused on content creators like YouTubers, TikTokers and Instagram people.”
MetaFrazo competed in VentureCat 2024, NU’s annual student startup competition.
The startup competed in the Business Products and Services track, making it to the semifinals.
Canh Tran, co-founder and CEO of Rippleshot, a company that uses software to detect fraud, judged MetaFrazo’s sector of the competition. He said he was impressed that MetaFrazo was already gaining revenue from its clients.
“A lot of startups have a hard time selling their innovation and getting people to pay for something,” Tran said. “When you’re a startup, it brings a lot of validation, and I think they had a good track of revenues.”
Jennifer Glaspie-Lundstrom, co-founder and CEO of Tandym, a financial technology startup, also served as a judge and said she was excited to see that the company had early customers.
Lundstrom said the co-founders could have strengthened their pitch during the competition by explaining the company’s finances better.
“They could have better presented their expected revenue opportunity and their expected costs,” she said. “There were judges that had more experience with this particular type of business model, the compute that’s required, the cost of the compute to run this type of product, and that was a big question at the end of the presentation.”
Schram said he wants to dominate the education niche before expanding MetaFrazo into multiple industries, including entertainment, marketing and communications.
Ultimately, the goal of MetaFrazo is to democratize education by breaking down language barriers, according to Scharm.
“We’re starting to achieve that goal and seeing early signs that that’s the future of the company,” Scharm said.
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