Modulate, the Boston audio AI company behind a gaming voice moderation tool called ToxMod, has raised USD $25 million in new funding.
The round, announced on Monday (September 28), was led by Future Ventures, with participation from existing investors Hyperplane and Lakestar, and takes its total funding to $60 million, according to Modulate.
Modulate‘s product line includes an AI music detection API, launched in June, which the company markets to streaming services and distributors.
Modulate was founded in 2017 by Carter Huffman and Mike Pappas, who met as physics undergraduates at MIT.
Huffman, previously the company’s CTO, has taken over as CEO. Pappas, who was still CEO in June when the firm launched its AI music detection API, is now Chairman.
The company has 40 to 45 employees and plans to add 10 more in the coming months, according to TechCrunch.
Data from PitchBook cited by TechCrunch put Modulate‘s valuation at $170 million before this round.
Modulate says its models analyze more than 10 million hours of audio a month, and that they have processed over 600 million hours in total.
The company says its transcription and deepfake detection models both rank first on Hugging Face leaderboards, and puts the accuracy of its synthetic voice detection at 98.9% on public benchmark data.
“Voice is becoming a primary interface for AI, and that creates a whole new set of problems that can’t be solved from a transcript.”
Carter Huffman, Modulate
“Voice is becoming a primary interface for AI, and that creates a whole new set of problems that can’t be solved from a transcript,” said Carter Huffman, CEO and co-founder of Modulate.
“We’re already using audio-native AI to protect organizations from deepfake attacks, help voice agents understand emotion and respond with more empathy, identify dangerous behavior in online conversations, and monitor whether voice agents are actually performing the way they’re supposed to.
“Underneath all of that are more than a hundred specialized models working together to understand what’s really happening across audio, with dramatically less cost and compute than traditional large models.”
“Modulate has gained a significant technical lead in audio-native AI, and the market opportunity is expanding quickly,” said Steve Jurvetson, Co-founder of Future Ventures.
“The team has proven these models in some of the most demanding voice environments in the world, and we’re now seeing the need for that technology to expand well beyond where it started into AI agents, security, customer experience, and more.
“This investment will help Modulate move faster, grow the team, put its models into the hands of more developers and partners, and establish audio intelligence as a foundational layer of the AI stack.”
“Modulate has gained a significant technical lead in audio-native AI, and the market opportunity is expanding quickly.”
Steve Jurvetson, Future Ventures
Modulate says the money will go toward AI and machine learning research, product and engineering, developer relations, and partnerships.
“Developers shouldn’t have to rebuild the audio intelligence layer every time they create a new voice experience,” Huffman added. “Our mission is to build the models and infrastructure that let them focus on the application they want to create.
“The opportunity facing audio-native AI is expanding incredibly quickly. We’ve built the technology and proven it at scale, and this investment lets us grow the team and move faster to meet that demand.”
The company sells its AI music detection API on a self-serve basis for $0.07 per hour of audio.
The tool runs three models across a recording, including one that identifies which parts of a clip contain music, speech or both, and two AI detectors, one scoring the vocal and one scoring the instrumental. It returns a result for every four-second window as well as a verdict for the clip as a whole, according to Modulate.
The firm pitches the API at streaming services, distributors, and clearance teams, and says it flags AI tracks at ingestion “before they dilute payouts for legitimate human artists.”
Modulate positions the product against existing detectors, claiming that rival tools score a track once rather than segment by segment, and that they misfire on human recordings that have been autotuned or compressed.
Modulate has not named a music industry customer for the API, though it said at launch in June that it was already seeing interest from major labels and distribution platforms.
Deezer, which has run its own AI detection tool since the start of 2025, said in July that it was taking in nearly 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day in June.
On peak days that made up more than 50% of all new music delivered to the service, according to Deezer, which says its system “sets an industry standard” and that it is now licensing the technology to the wider music industry.
TIDAL set out a policy in June to tag tracks it identifies as fully AI-generated and stop them earning royalties, while Qobuz announced its own detection system in February.
Ircam Amplify, the commercial arm of Paris research institute IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, launched an AI-generated music detector in 2024 aimed at labels, publishers, rights organizations, distributors, and streaming platforms.
Vobile launched an AI Song Detector aimed at DSPs, distributors, and collection societies in November 2025.
Montreal-based distribution and music creation platform LANDR said last week that it uses audio-recognition technology from Ircam Amplify and ACRCloud within its fraud prevention system.
Elsewhere in the streaming space, Apple Music‘s disclosure route relies on rightsholders declaring AI use themselves.
Apple Music told content providers in August that the Transparency Tags it introduced in March are now required wherever AI was used to create a material portion of a delivery, and that tagged content will carry a visible “Made With AI” label for listeners later this year.
Spotify‘s AI Credits, which entered beta in April, appear only where an artist has disclosed AI use through a label or distributor.
Spotify has said that the absence of a credit does not mean AI was not used on a song.
The one Spotify route that does not depend on disclosure targets the artist rather than the audio. The “AI Persona” badge, announced in August for profiles built around an AI-generated identity, is applied using human reviewers and “AI investigative tools” as well as self-disclosure, and music from profiles carrying it is kept out of Spotify‘s recommendations by default.
Spotify said the badge concerns an artist’s public identity rather than how their music was made.Music Business Worldwide