Modulate, a startup that fights against online toxicity, raised a $30M Series A funding round led by Lakestar and includes existing investors Everblue Esports, Hyperplane Management, and others. Mika Salmi, Managing Partner at Lakestar, will also join Modulate’s Board of Directors.
Fund usage
The funds will be used to grow the company’s team and scale its groundbreaking proactive voice moderation platform, ToxMod.
ToxMod employs sophisticated machine learning models to understand not only what each player is saying but also how they are saying it, including emotion, volume, prosody, and other factors. This is critical because what is harmful in one context may be friendly trash talk in another.
Tech at play
ToxMod distinguishes between these types of situations using its nuanced understanding of voice, identifying the worst actors while allowing everyone else to enjoy their own approach to each game. ToxMod can detect offences with greater than 98% accuracy (which improves over time) and allows moderation teams to respond to incidents more than 25 times faster.
“Modulate’s technology to identify toxic behavior is light years ahead of anything else in the market,” said Mika Salmi, Managing Partner at Lakestar. “We at Lakestar are excited to be a part of Modulate’s mission to stop toxicity in games and in other social applications.”
Modulate, founded in 2017 by Mike Pappas and Carter Huffman, has a product called ToxMod that provides proactive moderation, empowering platform and game moderators to make informed decisions to protect players from harassment, toxic behaviour, and even more pernicious harms. Modulate has assisted customers in dealing with thousands of instances of online toxicity, enabling operational efficiencies and revenue growth by creating a safe environment for players.
Lakestar currently holds investments in Revolut, Blockchain.com, Opendoor, Oscar, GetYourGuide, sennder, Eigen, Public.com, SoFi, Solarisbank, Uncapped, Yapily, Terra Quantum, accuRx, Rhino, ZEBEDEE and Hometogo to name a few. Lakestar has presence in Berlin, Zurich and London.
