Portfolio company AudioTelligence raises $8.5m in Series A funding

AudioTelligence, the company dedicated to making speech clear and intelligible in a noisy world, today announced that it has raised a further $8.5 million in Series A funding. 

The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Cambridge Enterprise, Cambridge Innovation Capital and CEDAR Audio.

While the adoption of voice-activated technologies in ‘smart’ homes and workplaces is on the rise, the accuracy of modern speech recognition systems remains severely limited in noisy environments.

To tackle this problem, AudioTelligence’s technology acts like auto-focus for sound, using data-driven ‘blind audio signal separation’ to home in on the source of interest and separate it from interfering noises. The technology enables microphones to focus on what users are saying, improving the audio quality for listeners, regardless of background noise.

Valuable applications for AudioTelligence’s technology include voice assistants operating in noisy environments, smart speakers, smart TVs and set-top boxes where broadcast sound interferes with command recognition, and two-way telephony in noisy places.

AudioTelligence recently demonstrated this capability at the CES show in Las Vegas. Tests with a home assistant platform showed that sentence recognition rate in noisy conditions jumped from 22 percent to 94 percent.

The $8.5 million investment will support AudioTelligence’s ambitious plans to disrupt the $10 billion voice market by fuelling further breakthroughs, supporting new partnerships with technology providers and tripling employee headcount over the next three years.

This latest investment round follows a $4.0 million (£3.1 million) seed funding in 2018 from Cambridge Innovation Capital and Cambridge Enterprise. The company was founded in 2017 as a spin-out from University of Cambridge-founded CEDAR Audio.

The company is a spin-out from Cambridge-based CEDAR Audio Ltd, a world leader in audio restoration, dialogue noise suppression and speech enhancement for the entertainment and audio forensic sectors. AudioTelligence also uses technology developed by the Signal Processing Group of the University of Cambridge, one of the leading global academic departments in this area.