One of London’s biggest tech success stories — Voices.com — has pulled in an $18-million investment from Silicon Valley’s Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.
Voices acts as a kind of broker for companies looking for voice-over work and voice actors. Their home base is the Bell Building on Dundas Street.
The company’s CEO and co-founder, David Ciccarelli, told AM980 this investment is significant compared to others they’ve received.
“Beforehand, we’ve been able to secure debt financing, which ultimately we need to pay back and we always have, and that was around $2 million, so to put that into perspective this is almost 10 times as large of an investment, and this is really Morgan Stanley taking a minority position or a minority stake in the ultimate success in the company, so by far the biggest investment we’ve ever received,” said Ciccarelli.
Ciccarelli explained how the cash will impact them.
“Hopefully, even more so, putting the city, the technology cluster, in terms of gaming and digital media and technology within the city, put it on not just the local map but hopefully the world scale as we carry out our plans in the years to come,” he said.
The company says the cash will be used to scale global operations, expand its client and subscriber product offerings and further enhance its technology.
The company has more than 200,000 voice actors representing more than 100 languages and dialects.