French startup Nijta wants to protect voice privacy in AI use cases

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Although recordings of your voice may seem harmless, they can actually reveal not only your identity, but also additional data such as your mood. But it can also discover diseases you may be suffering from.

Although people may not realize this yet, companies that process data are increasingly recognizing that they need to treat voice as personally identifiable information. This is especially true in Europe from a GDPR perspective. Many companies want to build AI based on voice data, but this often requires removing biometric information first.

Nijta wants to help in this regard by offering AI-powered voice anonymization technology to clients who need to comply with privacy requirements. Although its name is Hindi for privacy, its headquarters are in Lille, France. The company’s Indian CEO, Brij Srivastava, moved to France for his PhD at INRIA, his computer science and automation research institute.

Nijta was born out of Inria Startup Studio, a program aimed at supporting PhD entrepreneurs who want to start their own businesses. It paid off, and Nijta is now his young, award-winning B2B company, with him raising €2 million in funding from a variety of sources, including French deep tech VC fund Elaia and Lille-based investment firm Finovam Gestion. is raising funds.

“Europe is our key market,” Srivastava told TechCrunch. The main reason is simple: GDPR is a very strong data privacy law. While voice anonymization can be relevant in several areas, Nijta’s weakness is the combination of compliance and business opportunity.

“Nijta’s AI-powered voice anonymization technology provides a solution for many companies concerned about data privacy and excited about generative AI,” Celine Passdoue, investment director at Elaia, said in a statement. Stated.

Growing use cases

Call centers are a potential customer for Nijta in general, but even more so when dealing with health data.

One of our early collaborations was on Oky Doky, a project aimed at better handling of medical emergency calls. It’s easy to see how AI can help, but it’s clear that audio needs to be anonymized to remove the speaker’s identity and personally identifiable information from the training data.

Other use cases include defense scenarios, which Srivastava did not expand on for obvious reasons, as well as edtech, for example, where a child’s voice needs to be anonymized before leveraging AI to provide pronunciation feedback. Also included.

Content generated by Nijta is watermarked. This is becoming the standard, if not the entire rule when it comes to generative AI. The company also said that unlike some voice alterations, which are unwisely used by news organizations seeking to protect the victims they cover, Nijta Voice Harbor’s protections are irreversible.

Lack of awareness of voice privacy issues is one of the challenges that Nijta has to face. This is also why it seems logical to start with B2B and Europe. Even if customers don’t want voice privacy, risking large fines could turn companies into early adopters.

But eventually, Nijta wants to expand into B2C, for example to protect recorded messages. “Real-time anonymization for secure communications is also something we’re very actively researching,” Srivastava said. But B2C is years away. Nijta’s small team cannot be stretched too thin.

north tailwind

Nijta has seven team members, including Srivastava, his two full-time co-founders Seyed Ahmad Hosseini and Nathalie Vauquier, and his former professor, senior researcher and part-time co-founder Emmanuel Vincent. Srivastava hopes his team will grow to 10 people by June, but he’s also getting outside help for efforts the startup can’t do alone.

Business France, in particular, is helping Nijita reduce its internationalization costs, Srivastava said. “Because our company is small, we cannot hire many salespeople in different countries.” Instead, he can rely on leads from Business France representatives in specific countries. . “Most of the costs are [Lille’s] Hauts-de-France region. ” Additionally, our sister state Maryland has also opened its doors to startups.

This is one reason why when asked (often) why Nijta is based in Lille and not Paris, Srivastava has no problem answering. Some of the tailwinds this country enjoys are more broadly linked to France, but the country’s northernmost tip is conveniently located not only to Paris but also to Brussels, Amsterdam and London. Ta.

But to go international, Nijta needs to become multilingual. This is a big research and development challenge, but one that the startup is tackling with an eye toward Europe and Asia. It should also help that the startup is set to receive an additional €1 million from his Bpifrance deep technology development aid. This is a combination of a grant to cover research and development costs and a repayable advance payment. This also makes it easier to answer the question of why Srivastava chose Lille and France.