Germinator winner, Euphony, seeks additional investors

SYRACUSE — The majority owner of Euphony, Inc., the software company that won CenterState CEO’s Germinator competition, says the startup is “going to need investors” to grow.

 

“We’ve started speaking with several investors already, so we’re just starting those conversations,” says Fuz Eller, majority owner of Euphony, Inc. 

 

Euphony won the $100,000 grand prize in the Germinator business competition but will need more resources if it wants to expand, he says. 

 

Eller spoke with CNYBJ on Jan. 6 at the Syracuse Technology Garden where the startup is currently based. 

 

“Pretty much all here,” says Eller, when asked if Euphony has any of its operations outside the Tech Garden. He works from his home a lot, too.

 

Euphony is a company that provides text-to-speech [TTS] synthesis that can work with different emotions. The company website describes its work as a “platform for generating authentic text-to-speech voices” for augmentative and alternative communication applications (ACA).

 

“You express different emotions when you input text and allow someone to sound happy or sad or angry or sound like an air-traffic controller in a simulation,” says Eller. 

 

The firm’s product line is called EuphoniumTTS. 

 

Winning the Germinator competition felt “really good,” but Eller says the victory represented even more.

 

“It was a big relief to show that through a business-model program that demonstrates that we understand our markets, that we can sell a product, that we can identify customers and communicate with them and validate the need for our product,” says Eller.

 

Eller has one employee at Euphony, but hopes to add between five and seven full-time workers in 2017.

 

Besides Eller, SRC Inc. and CenterState CEO are minority owners in the Euphony firm. 

 

The business generated about $80,000 in revenue during 2016, Eller says, and he is projecting that total will jump to about $1 million in 2017. 

 

The company will pursue customers who are interested in assistive-speech technology, such as companies that develop devices and apps that help people who have problems communicating. 

 

“ACA developers … already use voices. They all sound the same today. None of them can sound happy or sad or angry, so we anticipate being the go-to for ACA developers to add emotion to their product lines,” says Eller. 

 

Once Euphony is able to expand into the simulation market, it hopes to sell to developers and producers of air-traffic control and cockpit simulators to help pilots in their training. 

 

Eller founded the company in November 2013 as he was working on the legal process to transition the technology away from Cicero–based SRC Inc., the former Syracuse Research Corporation, where he previously worked.

 

New start

Eller, who hails from England, joined the U.S. Air Force in 1983 and served through 2004 before joining SRC in Cicero, where he led various research and development projects.

 

He is a trained cryptologic linguist. The position is described as someone who can identify “foreign communications using signals equipment,” according to goarmy.com, the website of the U.S. Army.

 

Eller’s work included serving as the principal investigator for audio exploitation, which involved building a system that could express different emotions.

 

He described the technology as that which could imitate the sound of a human being in a particular environment.

 

“We could simulate humans in a controlled environment and allow the real humans working in the simulation to respond to these voices as if they were real to make the simulations more realistic for them,” says Eller.

 

The federal-government sequestration, or automatic spending cuts, in 2013 eliminated the funding for the work that Eller and his colleagues were doing.

 

But Eller didn’t want to give up on the technology.

 

“I asked SRC if I could take the technology and at least give it a chance, and they said yes. They gave me access to all of the inventions, intellectual property, and equipment,” he explains.

 

Eller spent the next year trying to figure out how to “simplify everything” to pursue the idea as a startup business.