This Indian GenAI Startup Is Reshaping Dubbing and Lip Sync
Co-founders of NeuralGarage after their SXSW win in March 2025.
Ever watched a film that felt odd because you watched the dubbed version? The visuals of lip-syncing often do not match what you hear, right? The Indian startup Neural Garage offers a solution that is an AI-powered one and addressees the long-standing problem of "visual discord" in dubbing. In an exclusive interview, Mandar Natekar, Co-founder and CEO, NeuralGarage shares details on the technology - Visual Dub - which fixes lip-sync, and facial expressions for dubbed content. It even works with changes in script.
In this exclusive interview, Natekar explains how the technology works by perfectly synchronizing actors' lip movements and facial expressions with the dubbed audio. The attempt creates an authentic and immersive viewing experience, eliminating the visual awkwardness often found in traditional dubbing.
Earlier this year, the world's first movie with AI-powered visual dubbing - Swedish sci-fi adventure film Watch the Skies - released in theatres. The Los Angeles-based movie-making AI firm Flawless worked on the visual dub for the English-dubbed version. NeuralGarage's Visual Dub also works on facial expressions and lip movements for dubbed versions without any fresh shoots.
Asked about the ways his innovative technology helps enhance the experience of watching dubbed versions of world cinema, Natekar says, 'We've also developed our own voice cloning technology. Let us say, there's a Tom Cruise film that has been dubbed in Hindi. Obviously, Tom Cruise lines will get dubbed by a Hindi dubbing artist - but he does not sound like Tom Cruise. Apart from ensuring that the lip-sync matches the Hindi version, we can even make the Hindi dubbing artist sound like Tom Cruise.'
'With our lip-sync technology and our voice cloning technology, we can actually now make the dubbed content look and sound absolutely natural as if it has been shot and filmed in the language of the audio itself.'
SXSW win
In March 2025, NeuralGarage created history when they won the SXSW Pitch Competition becoming the first Indian startup to bag the award. NeuralGarage's Visual Dub technology won in "Entertainment, Media, Sports & Content" category.
Recalling the moment, Mandar Natekar says, 'SXSW is one of the most prestigious platforms when it comes to entertainment worldwide. This is a platform where people in the business join talent from across the world, including Hollywood. You get to meet people from Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, business executives and actors, directors…..all of them come to the festival. This competition highlights some of the best startups in the world that could contribute to the entertainment industry. Winning meant we were judged by a jury that consisted of people in the business and people in the investor ecosystem - very big VCs were presented and that is the kind of intense validation for the technology we built, both in terms of the potential use cases and also in terms of the potential business valuation.'
'Winning the award gives us a lot of credibility. Being in the US makes us more easily marketable - the entire entertainment industry is kind of located here. Now SXSW award gives us instant credibility. We've been getting queries from some of the largest studios in the world and broadcast operations on how we can work together, ever since the awards."
Challenges of building NeuralGarage
Recalling his early career days, Natekar says, 'As a co-founder of the company - and I have three other co-founders - there are challenges. I spent more than 22 years in the entertainment business in India before co-founding my own. The startup world is totally different from the corporate life. The startup world is completely DIY - you have to do everything yourself. It has been a very interesting adventure - unlike the corporate life where you work to fulfill somebody else's dream, here you have the chance to turn your own dreams into reality and create your own legacy. There are ups and downs, but they are part and parcel of life. Some days you wake up thinking you'll win the world. Some day you go to bed thinking 'Man, is it all worth it?' But then you wake up in the morning and again restart."
'It is all very interesting. It's been four years now since we started up. And in the last one year since we've put our technology out, we've seen massive success and validation. We got selected by AWS and Google in their global accelerators. We got selected by TechCrunch to participate in TechCrunch Battlefield in SF last October. We also won the L'Oreal Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Competition, then this win at SXSW recently. Our ambition is to build software in India that can actually create a global brand. And we are on our way there.'
A few years ago, right in the middle of raising funds for his startup, Mandar Natekar faces major medical and personal hurdles. He refuses to revisit the time and delve on the hardships, but agrees to share what he learnt from the period of struggle.
"I'll tell you my biggest learning - in your life, there are three very strong pillars of any successful person. The first one is obviously your own determination and thought process while the second one is family. The third pillar is health. You have to ensure that all of these pillars are on very, very strong foundation. You have to nurture all of these pillars. If anything goes wrong in any one of these three, it can cause massive upheaval in your life.
Suggestions for aspiring tech startups founders
'I tell people to always chase dreams. If you think that you have a compelling idea that can change the world, work on it. And there is no better time to start on anything you want to do than now. Generally, people procrastinate - 'I'll build this after five years' but these plans don't work. If you are passionate about something and have a compelling idea that you want to bring to the world, do it now. There is no better time than this moment. If you base your decision-making on goalposts, you will always be calculating,' Natekar signs off with his bits of suggestions for aspiring founders of tech startups all across.
(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
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