Echo Labs Announces $2M Pre-Seed Round; Joins AI Grant, Techstars, and UChicago Deep Ventures.

Sometimes, all it takes is a phone call.

On June 19th, in the middle of the night, I called my best friend with a moonshot idea. On June 20th, we quit our jobs and flew to San Fransisco together in pursuit of that crazy future.

Fast forward to today, exactly three months later, I’m so excited to announce that that future is closer than ever; our company—Echo Labs–has raised an oversubscribed $2M pre-seed round and was accepted into AI Grant, Techstars, and UChicago Deep Ventures.

What is Echo Labs? Echo Labs is building the first-ever AI capable of human-level transcription. State-of-the-art upon release.

Why? Because today’s $30B transcription market is made of options that are either inaccurate (think Siri) or expensive (think humans) - we’re developing a new, foundational neural network model that we believe will make us the first to finally bridge this $30B gap between the digital and physical worlds - a major departure from current methods. 

What’s next? With a plethora of potential use cases, we’ve decided to begin applying our tech by making accessibility affordable for the ~6,000 US higher-ed institutions that need to caption their content. We’ll help academia save (a lot of) money and make education accessible to all students regardless of hearing ability, language proficiency, or learning style. In a time where AI is often in the news for all the wrong reasons, we’re thrilled to start applying our tech in a way that helps us scale societal inclusivity.

Will it become sentient? Hopefully, no. But, for the record, I for one welcome our new overlords. 

Finally, I wanted to take a moment to thank some of the incredible people who have helped us get to this point. Despite being small-town 19-year-olds with zero connections in the ‘valley’, we were met with open arms and incredible generosity. Their belief in us propelled EL farther and faster than we could’ve imagined. 

Thank you to Ravikant Cherukuri , Vinay Narayan , 🌳📖🌎 Ganesh Kumar , Simarpreet Singh , Michael Lew , Rahul Bhardwaj , and Charles Cushing for their incredible mentorship. All brilliant in their own right with priceless lived startup experience - they helped light the way. Also, thank you to Dundee Venture Capital and Nat Friedman for taking this leap with us and putting together our pre-seed round. Finally, thank you to Sahan Reddy for being the best co-founder anyone could ask for - and for being crazy enough to jump with me.

Now, the hard work begins. 

Next announcement Christmas 2023, but you can join our Sunday-night blog at el.ai. 

Edward Aguilar

Co-Founder & CEO of Echo Laboratories, INC.