The Story of Modulate: Building the Future of Online Voice Intelligence

The best startup ideas don’t always come from solving your own problems. Sometimes they emerge from asking deeper questions about how technology shapes human connection. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Modulate CEO Mike Pappas revealed how a series of philosophical discussions at MIT led to building a company that’s reshaping online voice communication.

From MIT Physics to Voice Technology

The story begins at MIT, where Mike and his future CTO Carter were studying physics and math. Rather than diving straight into entrepreneurship, they took a methodical approach to finding their path. “We were absolutely those kids in school that were already brainstorming about that startup we were going to build one day,” Mike recalls. “We never quite figured out what we wanted to do for that startup while we were in undergrad.”

Instead of rushing to start something, they deliberately split up to gain complementary experiences. “I mostly went into software companies that had distinctive cultures to learn more about building an effective organization. Carter went into NASA’s jet propulsion lab to go really deep into the machine learning, science side of things,” Mike explains.

The Internet’s Unfulfilled Promise

During their college years, Mike and Carter would go on long walks discussing technology’s impact on society. A central question emerged: was the internet living up to its promise? As Mike puts it, “The more we talked about this online space and the incredible power of what these online worlds enable us to do, and the more we looked at the reality that is so often, that this exposure to diversity actually just reinforces sort of shallowness and bias in many cases.”

This philosophical foundation would later prove crucial when they encountered their market opportunity, though not in the way they initially expected.

The Pivot That Changed Everything

When Modulate first started approaching gaming studios, they were focused on voice-changing technology. But customers kept asking about voice moderation capabilities. Mike, still thinking like a technologist, initially resisted: “I, being a technologist, would say, ‘hey, that’s a totally different product. You’ve clearly misunderstood what I’m presenting.'”

The market’s persistence eventually broke through. “Our first customers found us and banged down the door and made us understand that this was a thing that they deeply needed,” Mike remembers. This pivot to voice moderation through their ToxMod product proved transformative, leading to partnerships with major gaming studios including Call of Duty and a more than 4x increase in annual recurring revenue last year.

Building Beyond Gaming

While gaming remains their primary focus, Modulate’s vision extends far beyond it. Mike describes their mission as “prosocial voice intelligence,” explaining, “We want to be the organization that enables everyone across the globe to have more meaningful, richer, deeper conversations with each other and to understand each other and make the most out of those conversations.”

This broader vision opens up possibilities in various sectors. Healthcare applications have shown “quite a shocking number of different interesting” use cases. Online dating, while perhaps a smaller market, presents an opportunity to protect people when they’re “making themselves very vulnerable.”

The Future of Voice Intelligence

Looking ahead, Modulate is positioning itself at the intersection of safety, privacy, and meaningful communication. Their work with gaming studios has revealed the complexity of the regulatory landscape, where different regions and countries are taking varying approaches to online safety and privacy.

As Mike sees it, Modulate’s role isn’t just to provide technology, but to help shape how online platforms approach voice communication in an increasingly complex world. It’s a vision that brings them full circle to those early MIT discussions about technology’s impact on human connection – but now with the tools and experience to actually shape that future.

For Modulate, the future of voice intelligence isn’t just about moderation or safety – it’s about enabling the kind of meaningful online interactions that the internet has long promised but rarely delivered. It’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest companies start not with a product, but with a question about how technology could better serve humanity.