Former Apple researcher-founded AI company Nuance secures $50 million in funding, with Nvidia and other institutions participating.

BlockBeats news, September 14: Seattle-based AI startup Nuance has completed a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, Nvidia's NVentures, South Park Commons, and Define Ventures. Founded in 2025, the company previously completed a $10 million seed round in July last year.

Nuance was co-founded by three former Apple researchers with the goal of addressing the "lag" and "unnaturalness" issues in existing AI voice assistants and virtual humans. Co-founder and CEO Fangchang Ma stated that most current AI virtual humans stitch together speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech components, which easily leads to delays and makes it difficult to capture real-time reactions, micro-expressions, and other details in human communication.

Nuance plans to adopt a single model from the ground up to handle audio and video input and audio-video output, and to train the model using real audiovisual data collected internally and provided by data partners. The company is still in the product development stage and plans to release a public research preview later this year, with future applications in AI interviews, speech practice, language learning, and enterprise customer scenarios such as sales and customer service.

Currently, the Nuance team consists of only 8 people. The company stated that the new funding will primarily be used to expand the R&D team and further recruit marketing and commercialization talent.