Modulate, a leader in the fight against online toxicity, announced the completion of a $30 million Series A funding round led by Lakestar with participation from existing investors Everblue Esports, Hyperplane Management, and others. In addition, Mika Salmi, Managing Partner of Lakestar, will join Modulate’s Board of Directors. The company will use the funds to expand its team and continue scaling its groundbreaking proactive voice moderation platform, ToxMod™.

“ToxMod is changing the way game developers attack toxic behavior in their communities and this funding is a real validation of our mission to make online communities safer,” said Mike Pappas, CEO of Modulate. “We’re thrilled to welcome Mika and his vast store of experience to the Board as we grow our team and ramp-up the development and deployment of ToxMod.”

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ToxMod uses sophisticated machine learning models to go beyond transcription and understand not just what each player is saying but how they are saying it – including their emotion, volume, prosody, and more. This is crucial, as what’s harmful in one context may be friendly trash talk or genuinely supportive in another. ToxMod uses its nuanced understanding of voice to differentiate between these types of situations, identifying the worst actors while leaving everyone else free to enjoy their own approach to each game. Thanks to this sophistication, ToxMod can detect offenses with greater than 98% accuracy (which further improves over time), and enable moderation teams to respond to incidents over 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.”

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