AI dubbing company Papercup co-founder and CEO, Jesse Shemen, announced via a post on LinkedIn dated May 15, 2025, that “a large portion of the Papercup team is joining Scale AI, a company I’ve long admired for shaping the future of AI across both public and enterprise sectors.”
While both Shemen and AI data annotation giant Scale AI are seemingly keeping details of their merger under wraps, Shemen also said in his post that “It is a bittersweet moment. While it’s difficult to see Papercup take a different path than I had imagined, I’m deeply proud of what we accomplished.” He is joining Scale himself, but it is not known what his role will be.
For its part, Scale AI published an announcement on the same date as Shemen’s post, welcoming the Papercup team, who “brings deep experience in audio ML, localization workflows, and production-grade infrastructure.”
Papercup launched in December 2017 with Shemen and Jiameng Gao as CTO. The company set out to use machine learning to create a video AI dubbing platform, and by December 2020, it had raised USD 10.87m, a pre-series round led by LocalGlobe and Sands Capital Ventures, according to a press statement.
By 2021, Papercup had grown to 20 people. At the time, spotting a largely untapped market, Shemen shared with Slator that they “saw that there were billions of hours of content that is stuck in a single language.” He was referring to major media outlets such as Bloomberg Media, which became a Papercup customer in November 2022.
Building on the promise of fast growth, Papercup had in fact raised USD 20m in a Series A earlier in 2022, led by Octopus Ventures. A number of other investors participated, including LocalGlobe and Sands Capital Ventures once again. From the start, the AI dubbing pioneer was also backed by individual investors, which included Intercom Co-founder Des Traynor and Stripe Co-founder John Collison.
Since the Series A, Papercup appeared to be on a growth trajectory, signing up several additional large media clients, which likely made it an attractive target for acquisition. Scale AI was founded only a year earlier than Papercup and is now looking to raise funds at an astounding USD 25 billion valuation.
Hat tip to Yota Georgakopoulou of Athena Consultancy, who alerted us to this story.