Nvidia Joins $50M Series A for Seattle’s Nuance Labs
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Nuance Labs, a Seattle startup trying to make artificial intelligence better at face-to-face conversation, has closed a $50 million early-stage round. Lightspeed Venture Partners, which backed the company’s seed round, led the Series A. Existing investors Accel and South Park Commons returned, and Nvidia and Define Ventures joined as new backers.
The Washington company is building what it calls a human foundation model, meant to power avatars that can hold a conversation without the lag and awkwardness of current chatbots. The pitch rests on giving those avatars more emotional intelligence.
Co-founder and chief executive Fangchang Ma, formerly an AI researcher at Apple, has described the problem this way in interviews. Today’s voicebots and avatars are stitched together from separate models: one converts speech to text, a large language model writes a reply, and a third turns that reply back into audio. Avatars add a fourth step to animate a face. Each handoff adds delay and strips away the sense of talking to a person, so avatars often appear frozen while someone is speaking to them.
Nuance’s answer is a single full-duplex system. The model takes in an audiovisual stream of the user to understand what they are saying and doing, and at the same time streams back an audiovisual response. It can read words, gaze, gestures, tone, and timing, then respond in real time with facial and vocal expressions, including reacting while the user is still mid-sentence, the way people do. The model improves by studying how people behave during its conversations. Audio and video come in, audio and video go out, all through one model.
The company has posted a demo that it describes as a work in progress. Target use cases include sales and customer service, coaching, professional training, and education, where a person might join a video call to learn a language or rehearse an interview.
No product has launched yet. Nuance is still refining the model to make conversations feel more fluid and expects to release a first public research preview later this year. The new funding will speed up that development work and pay for more researchers.
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