Deepdub

The Krakowski brothers and the dubbing idea

Deepdub was founded in 2019 by two brothers, Ofir and Nir Krakowski. According to their brother Oz, who joined the company later as chief revenue officer, Ofir set up the Israeli Air Force's machine learning department, and Nir had about 25 years of experience in technology development, including in cybersecurity, and was a co-founder of a company that went through the Y Combinator accelerator. They came up with the idea after conversations with people in the entertainment industry: demand for translated content was growing with the competition between streaming services, and dubbing is a slow and expensive process.

How AI dubbing works

According to the company's description in 2022, traditional dubbing of a two-hour film into another language takes 15 to 20 weeks, and Deepdub finishes such a project in about four weeks. It takes two to three minutes of the original actor's voice and builds a model that carries the characteristics of that voice into the target language, so the dubbed version sounds closer to the original. The company did not describe the method itself in detail. It is also important to note what the model does not do on its own: at every stage, from translation through adaptation to the mix, professionals are involved who supervise and correct. It is a full service, not just software.

The funding round and the first customers

In February 2022 the company raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners, with participation from Booster Ventures, Stardom Ventures and Swift VC. The private investors included Kevin Reilly, former chief content officer of HBO Max, and Emiliano Calemzuk, former president of Fox Television Studios. At the time the company had 30 employees, most of them in Tel Aviv. Its first projects included dubbing foreign series into English for the streaming service Topic, and a feature film dubbed into Latin American Spanish with synthetic voices.

From dubbing to voice agents

In 2026 Deepdub expanded from dubbing to real-time voice agents. In March it launched the Phantom X 3.2 model, which according to the company clones a voice from one second of recording and stresses syllables correctly in languages where the position of the stress changes the meaning, such as Hebrew and Russian. In February it announced a partnership with the Israeli company Wonderful, whose AI agents use Deepdub's emotional speech engine. In September it launched Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational, with expanded support for Hebrew and a response time of about 150 milliseconds until audio starts. According to the company, it trains its speech models itself and does not license them.

Market, numbers and open questions

On the dubbing side, work with channels and studios continues. In February 2026 the company announced a partnership with Love TV Channels, a European channel operator, to dub documentary series into Spanish, Italian and French, at a saving of more than 80% compared with traditional dubbing, according to the company. Note that the performance figures all come from the company's announcements, and they are not consistent either: in March 2026 it spoke of more than 130 languages and dialects, and in September of more than 50 language regions checked by local experts. Dubbing itself is also controversial among viewers. The creator of "Squid Game," for example, recommended watching the series with subtitles rather than in the dubbed version.