3Play Media secures seed funding

Audio transcription and captioning company lands $450,000 angel funding round

Audio transcription startup 3Play Media has secured $450,000 of a $600,000 seed funding round, according to a regulatory filing.

According to lead investor Tole Khesin, a member of Boston-based angel firm Launchpad Venture Group, eight different investors contributed to the angel funding round. Khesin, who was made director of marketing at 3Play, says he invested in the company outside of Launchpad.

Based on knowledge and methodology drawn from the Spoken Language Systems Group and the MIT Sloan School of Management, 3Play's transcription solution is three-tiered. The first step employs automatic transcription via computer speech recognition technology to produce a first draft, which a professional then reviews and revises word-for-word in the second stage. Finally, transcriptions and captions for videos are again reviewed and checked for errors.

Supplementing its transcription solutions, 3Play provides a variety of extra features like tag clouds representative of entire media libraries, keyword density meters that show how many times a term appears in a transcription, and the ability to click anywhere in the transcription to skip the video to that clip.

The company says it handles projects of any scope, from single files to whole media libraries.

Founded in 2007 by four MIT graduate students--Josh Miller, Chris Johnson, Chris Antunes and Jeremy Barron--3Play Media at the moment has only five employees, but is looking for a developer and a quality assurance manager.

The new seed funding will be used for further business development.