Cisco is buying EzDubs, a Y Combinator–backed startup known for real-time voice translation that preserves a speaker’s tone and emotion. The networking giant announced the deal without disclosing terms and plans to fold EzDubs’ technology into its Cisco Collaboration portfolio, bringing live translation and voice-dubbing capabilities to products like Webex across both software and hardware.
Founded in 2023 by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar, EzDubs quickly drew attention for its speech-to-speech translation tools. Notably, Nassar previously worked in Cisco’s Speech AI group before co-founding the company. The startup raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Venture Highway, founded by former WhatsApp executive Neeraj Arora. Other backers include Amjad Masad and Michele Catasta of Replit, Qasar Younis of Applied Intuition, and Ben Firshman of Replicate, which was recently acquired by Cloudflare.
Cisco says the EzDubs team will join its Collaboration unit and work alongside product, engineering, and go-to-market groups. The goal is to elevate AI from a supportive layer to a core capability in meetings, messaging, and voice. In addition to enhancing Webex, Cisco signaled it may make the translation technology available to partners and developers, widening its reach across enterprise workflows. The company has not specified whether every EzDubs employee is coming onboard.
As part of the transition, EzDubs will wind down its consumer apps by December 15. Those tools enabled live, emotion-preserving translations for phone calls in more than 30 languages and helped the company go viral with a video dubbing feature that attracted millions of views on X.
The acquisition highlights a broader shift in the multilingual communication market toward enterprise-ready solutions. Recent deals include Palabra AI acquiring live communication platform Talo and TransPerfect buying Unbabel. With the translation services market estimated around $40 billion, the move underscores a key question: can consumer-only translation apps thrive when enterprises are where adoption and budgets are growing fastest?
What this means for users and teams is straightforward: expect more natural, multilingual meetings and calls inside Cisco’s collaboration suite, with real-time dubbing that keeps speakers sounding like themselves. For developers and partners, the potential platform access hints at new integrations for customer support, sales, training, and global operations—areas where seamless, high-quality translation can deliver immediate ROI.
