When Ukrainian AI startup and TechNexus Venture Collaborative portfolio company Respeecher helped recreate the voice of young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian, it marked a high-profile breakthrough in synthetic speech.
But for CEO and co-founder Alex Serdiuk, that was only the beginning.
“What we built here is two pillars. The first is quality, second is trust,” Serdiuk said. “Those pillars are essential when they work in combination.”
Founded in 2018, Respeecher develops high-fidelity voice cloning technology used in film, gaming, animation, and healthcare. From de-aging Tom Hanks’s voice to refining actress Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing voice in Emilia Perez, the Kyiv-based startup has quietly become a trusted player behind some of the most ambitious uses of voice AI in entertainment.
Four Oscar-Nominated Projects
In just the past year, Respeecher contributed to four films recognized at the Academy Awards, including The Brutalist, The Better Man, Aliens, and Emilia Perez.
In The Brutalist, Serdiuk said, “our technology was used to polish [the actors’] Hungarian voices in order to make them sound perfect for Hungarian listeners.” The film saw Adrien Brody win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
In The Better Man, they cloned Robbie Williams’s voice for narration and songs, especially helpful given the singer’s discomfort with extended studio sessions.
For Emilia Perez, the team’s technology was used on postproduction to refine the voice of the titular character, focusing on pitch accuracy and pronunciation. The film won the Oscar for Best Original Song.
This visibility has brought new opportunities and a pivotal strategic shift. Serdiuk said Respeecher is moving away from a pure service model and toward a platform licensing business, allowing studios and approved partners to use pre-built voice models under controlled conditions.
Serdiuk said Respeecher has already signed deals with celebrity estates — including voices from Chris Farley, Orson Wells, and Stan Lee — to create models that can be requested by big studios and small creators and be used as soon as the engagement is approved by IP owners.
The startup is also powering James Earl Jones's Darth Vader character voice in the Fortnite video game.
Playing the Long Game With Ethics
While some AI voice companies chase scale through open platforms, Respeecher has taken the opposite approach, betting its future on studio-grade quality and strict ethical compliance.
“From the very first question, our team asks whether [clients] have permission for the voice they want to recreate,” Serdiuk said.
The company has turned down high-profile projects involving controversial voices in entertainment and politics, even when those individuals had given personal consent.
“It’s very unusual for a startup to be so deep on background checking,” Serdiuk said. “But that’s our investment into our Hollywood reputation.”
Respeecher’s ethical framework also includes technical safeguards: They collaborate with deepfake detection companies like Pindrop and Reality Defender to ensure they can detect even respeecher’s state-of-the-art synthetic speech. And they advocate for stronger legislation to prosecute unauthorized use of digital likenesses.
The Next Steps
Serdiuk believes AI voice will play a transformative role across industries — not just in entertainment, but in AI assistants, language learning, and immersive experiences.
“The best way to communicate with something human-like is through verbal channel communication,” he said. “We are yet to see voice-first interfaces truly take off.”
To prepare, Respeecher has brought on heavyweight advisors like former Disney Television president Garth Ancier and Legendary Entertainment founder John Jashni.
“That’s one more confirmation of the Respeecher strategy being the right strategy for Hollywood,” Serdiuk said.
With new demos like a synthetic Stan Lee expected later this year, Serdiuk is focused on building a platform that not only scales but sets the bar for what responsible AI can sound like.