Berlin-based ai|coustics raises €5M seed round, bringing studio-quality sound to Voice AI.

ai|coustics has raised €5 million in a seed funding round to bring its AI-powered studio-quality sound to every platform and device. The round was led by new investors Partech, with the participation of Acurio, Intuition and Arc Investors, as well as existing investors Connect and FOV Ventures, and angel investors including Mehdi Ghissassi (CPO at AI 71 and former director & head of product at Google DeepMind, Gert Lanckriet (Head of AI, Amazon Music), Hazel Savage (Former Co-Founder and CEO of AI Company Musiio acquired by Soundcloud) and Thomas Wolf (CSO, HuggingFace).

An emerging player in the Voice AI space, ai|coustics is setting a new standard for audio quality with its API and SDK. Using generative and reconstructive AI which repairs missing frequencies, like bringing color to a black and white movie or optimizing a pixelated image, ai|coustics provides studio-quality sound for any recording, device, voice and context. Their first clients include Elgato, DHD.audio, and broadcasters Deutsche Welle and Radio France, and they’ve also partnered with other technology providers including Infineon Technologies, Cadence, XMOS, and Sieve. They already have 500,000 users who have enhanced more than two million minutes of audio.

While the market is crowded with synthetic voices and voice-to-text tools, ai|coustics specializes in preserving the original human voice. Aligning with a growing demand for integrity in Voice AI, ai|coustics never tampers with speech content and preserves the characteristics and timbre of the speaker’s original voice.

ai-coustics co-founder and CEO Fabian Seipel says, “This is an exciting step forward in our vision of bringing quality and authenticity to the Voice AI realm. It was great to see this oversubscribed round, and we’re looking forward to working with Partech, alongside so many experienced angel investors, to bring studio-quality sound to the forefront.”

Boris Golden, General Partner at Partech, says, “The market standard for sound quality is ever growing, and Voice AI apps are requiring more and more qualitative data, but the average quality of voice recordings is still very poor. Bringing software-enabled “studio quality sound”, without the need for expensive hardware or technical expertise, is the most efficient way to solve this growing problem at scale. And we are convinced that ai|coustics’ team and technology position them as the future leader of this market!”

Offering new vistas of audio quality across the communication and content industries, ai|coustics optimizes processes and cuts tedious post-production workflows with an API which can repair home recordings, poor-quality microphones, environmental noise and more. The SDK tool offers a software-meets-hardware solution, transforming even the cheapest microphones into high-quality sound and allowing device manufacturers to upgrade every device with just a few lines of code.

This new seed funding is a crucial next step in ai|coustics mission to become a global leader in the voice AI space, centering authenticity and intelligibility for real human voices. Its machine-learning base speech quality technology has already hit the market, and this new round will see the company expand its platform and products, as well as finessing its market penetration.