Audience closes $15 million round of funding
Continued support from existing investors demonstrates confidence in Audience’s technology and business plans
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 23, 2008 – Audience today announced it raised $15 million in Series C funding in March, bringing the total funding amount to date to $45 million. Demonstrating confidence in the company’s technology based on the intelligence of the human hearing system, existing investors funded the round. These include NEA, Tallwood Venture Capital, Vulcan Capital and VentureTech Alliance.
“Audience’s technology is a remarkable innovation with many applications,” said George Pavlov, General Partner, Tallwood Venture Capital, and Audience Board member. “The company already has design wins for its first voice processor for the mobile handset market and will be making its technology available to other markets in the future.”
Audience’s first product, the A1010 Voice Processor, is currently in production. By thoroughly understanding the auditory pathway – from the cochlea to the brainstem to the thalamus and cortex – Audience is the first company to deliver a commercial product based on the science of Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA), or the grouping and processing of complex mixtures of sound. Because the Audience Voice Processor handles signals the way people actually perceive specific sounds, it is able to identify and suppress noise sources in an extremely efficient and accurate manner.
“This financing from our existing investors demonstrates their confidence in our technology, products and market opportunity,” said Peter Santos, Audience president and CEO. “We will use this capital to scale our business by adding to our current voice processor design wins, introducing new products and expanding into new markets.”
About Audience
Audience is a voice processor company that enables clear communications anywhere with noise suppression technology based on the intelligence of the human hearing system. The technology is applicable across a broad range of consumer products where voice needs to be intelligible in noisy environments, and its first commercial product is for the mobile handset market. Audience was selected as the Most Innovative True Mobile Start-Up for the “2008 GSMA Mobile Innovation Global Awards.” The company is one of 34 founding member companies of the Open Handset Alliance and the only one with advanced noise suppression technology. Investors in Audience include Vulcan Capital, NEA, Tallwood Venture Capital and VentureTech Alliance. Audience, www.audience.com, is based in Mountain View, California.