Famehall's exclusive story on Anuja Dhawan, the cofounder of Dubverse.ai. Dubverse is on a mission to democratize video production using AI.
Formal Education and Career -
Born and brought up in a town near Delhi called Meerut, Anuja Dhawan majored in Financing and Accounting in Delhi University. Naturally, she progressed towards the auditing and financial side of things by working at KPMG for a year and half. But soon she realized that she is not very comfortable being a small fish in a big pond as she would rather be in a smaller pond where she would have more influence.
That is when she got to thinking about what she wanted to do. In India around 2015 there was a start-up boom. She primarily reached out to every start-up which was out there around that time before stumbling upon LineTray. She started working for them and ended up working there for five years doing everything from admin Ops 2 operations to sales business and International expansion. But after about five years, she realized that she wanted to see things more at scale. Which was when she decided to move on to Freshworks. She worked there for about a year and half on the business side of things which really added to her experience.
When Covid happened, everyone was back home and that’s when her co-founder is trying to find a niche where AI generative can basically put into actual use for real problems in the world. He stumbled upon the idea when education was going digital during covid era to do it in the vernacular language.
There is so much content which exists in English. But not everyone understands the language. It's always been an upward ladder where people have to first learn English and then gain knowledge in any other subject that they have to, which was the landscape work he started working on. He built an MVP, which is where Anuja Dhawan comes into the picture. She takes the MVP, or the solution that he had and takes it into the market. She is a business and operations person there. He takes care of the tech and product side of things. That was how her journey had been for about a year.
Brief about the start-up -
‘Dubverse’ was Varshul’s idea states Anuja Dhawan. During covid when digital education had content primarily in English, to make it available to every last village in India, creating it in each language is not feasible. Technology has reached a certain phase where it is able to translate all of this into multiple languages on the go and then make it more and more acceptable across different languages.
Unique thing about the start-up and future plans -
The content being created is very linear in the sense that there is a camera, a person, a mic. Every individual has to record something, go back and edit to make sure everything is looking and sounding perfect. That is when it gets released. There are also higher production movies which take years to make and a lot of investment in terms of money.
In order to repurpose it, or use it across different languages, the only barrier that exists in today’s globalized world is language. Because of the internet you have access to nearly everything but if you don’t understand a specific language, it becomes redundant.
That is where Dubverse comes in. They are trying to break this language barrier on the internet wherein it becomes more unified and quality content is available for all and not just to people who speak English.
Their future plans for them is to take it forward. There already exists a lot of consumable content created with AI voices. Moving forward, Dubverse aims to enable more creators by bringing them the technology to create more content in cost-efficient ways. They also want to be able to publish Modiji’d Mann Ki Bath in every language with his voice running real time which is very difficult and hasn’t been done before. But they are optimistic that it will be achieved very soon.
Challenges -
The most challenging and the most beautiful part of all this is the team, says Anuja Dhawan. To curate a team by picking people that align with you and finding that right fit is very important. At this point in their start-up, she believes, everyone that works together fits. Most of them are Ex-Founders or founded companies in the past and coming together really changes a lot. Building an organization is based on interaction between humans. She states that the most challenging part is finding the right set of people that you want to work with.
Overcoming initial failures -
“Working at a start-up, there is a lot of creating production going on from within, so there is no one telling you what to do what to do on a day-to-day basis, no one who will tell you if you’re doing right or wrong,” says Anuja Dhawan, “the only way to overcome that is to have faith and believe in yourself. Have trust in your own capabilities and that everything will fall into place eventually.”
Greatest source of inspiration -
Her parents, especially her father, is her greatest source of inspiration Anuja Dhawan tells us. He has been a workaholic all his life and watching him while growing up has taught her a lot. She believes she carries his hard-working tendencies with her everywhere she goes.
Advice to young entrepreneurs -
Anuja Dhawan believes that entrepreneurship is not just about owning a company, it is about how you can showcase ownership in whatever work that you’re doing. That can be any type of work for that matter. Gathering the right experience to do that is the most important part of becoming an entrepreneur.
Achievements –
In just one year, Dubverse was able to create over five hundred hours of content in 10 different languages. A lot of this content is published online on YouTube or on internal servers of people that they have worked with. A year ago, nobody would have thought that this was possible but they have been able to make it a reality with the cutting-edge technology that they have in house.