Czech startup Elredo raises €1m to bring AI audiobooks to the US

The Czech startup Elredo, founded by Matěj Šmalec, has raised one million euros (more than 24 million crowns) from investors and plans to use the money to conquer the American market — it is there that the founder sees the greatest potential for his project.

Elredo has developed the Elredo Voice platform, which fully automates audiobook production for publishers — from selecting suitable voices and narration to sound quality control and mastering, all without any human voice involved. “We're partly relocating to the US — the four of us, because we got into one of the startup accelerators in New Jersey. We're leaving at the end of October,” Šmalec says.

The choice of New Jersey is no accident: the company's key partners are located nearby, including the distribution platform Audible and the major American academic publisher Wiley & Sons, which has a history of more than 200 years. Recently another big name was added to the client list — the publisher HarperCollins, the world's second-largest publisher of popular fiction.

The main investor in the new round was the fund JIC Ventures. “Matěj has broken into the world of US and UK publishers, and now he's setting his sights on Arabic-speaking countries too. It was precisely this momentum that convinced us,” says the fund's managing partner, Miloš Sochor. The round was also joined by the Central Bohemian Innovation Centre, investor Jiří Hlavenka and the Swedish venture fund Bond Ventures, as well as existing angel investors — Martin Ježek, Petr Bláha and the group 12bullets, represented by Petr Sochora, who had already put several million crowns into the startup back in January this year.

Elredo will spend most of the new funding on its American expansion, relocating the team and scaling up sales, with 20-30% going toward further developing the platform itself. Besides its transatlantic ambitions, the company has also strengthened its position on the home market: after partnering with the publisher Albatros Media, it managed to strike deals with the biggest player, Euromedia Group, as well as with the publisher Burdon. Knihy Dobrovský has also recently shown interest. “In Czechia we now work with all the key publishers,” Šmalec notes.

Dozens of audiobooks made by Elredo are already on sale — from English-language non-fiction titles and a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories to Czech comic novels and a series of HarperCollins's Harlequin romance stories. The company earns money from a fixed production fee plus a share of future audiobook sales, which already allows it to be profitable. The plan is to scale production up to a thousand books a month through the extensive use of AI agents.

Competition is fierce: the main rival in the synthetic speech market is the Polish-British company ElevenLabs, valued at $11 billion, which already has its own product for the full audiobook production cycle. Besides it, Elredo is up against giants like Amazon, Google and Apple, which can subsidise audiobook production for their own services. The company's answer to this pressure is meant to be a comprehensive ecosystem offering publishers markedly better terms.