Cisco acquires translation startup EzDubs

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 did not disclose the size of the deal.

EzDubs was founded by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Karim Nassar in 2023. Notably, Nassar previously worked at Cisco’s Speech AI group before co-founding the startup. The company has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway, founded by Neeraj Arora, who was previously WhatsApp’s business director. Other investors in EzDubs include Replit CEO Amjad Massad; Replet President Michele Catasta; Qasr Yunus, CEO of self-driving vehicle software company Applied Intuition; and Ben Fershman, CEO of cloud startup Replicate (acquired by Cloudflare in a deal announced Monday).

Cisco said it plans to integrate EzDubs technology into its communications platform, Cisco Collaboration, which includes hardware and software. This means users can get features like live translation in products like video calling and Webex messaging. Cisco’s blog post also noted that it could make the translation technology — which preserves the speaker’s original voice — available to partners and developers.

“The EzDubs team will join Cisco Collaboration, working alongside product, engineering, and go-to-market teams. Together, we will chart a new path for the industry, one where AI not only supports collaboration, but truly enables it,” Snorre Kjespo, senior vice president of collaboration at Cisco, said in the post.

Cisco has not made clear whether all members of the EzDubs team will join the company. We’ve asked the company for clarification and will update the story if we hear back.

EzDubs is discontinuing its consumer apps, which support call translation for more than 30 languages, by December 15.

“From launching the world’s first video dubbing tool that garnered millions of views on

In recent months, there have been some acquisitions in the translation space. This month, Seven Seven Six-backed startup Palabra AI acquired live communication platform Talo. In July, language localization company TransPerfect acquired Unbabel, a translation startup founded in Portugal.

The EzDubs acquisition also raises the question of whether it is possible to create consumer-focused translation when there is more money and demand in the enterprise communications market. According to various reports, the translation services market is worth around $40 billion.