Audience, a voice processor company, closes $15 million round of funding

Financial support demonstrates confidence in Audience’s business plan

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 25, 2009 – Audience today announced it raised $15 million in Series D funding in February, bringing the total funding amount to date to $60 million. Demonstrating confidence in the company’s ability to capitalize on its leadership position in a new emerging market, existing investors funded the round. Investors include New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Tallwood Venture Capital, Vulcan Capital and VentureTech Alliance.

“With its deployments by major handset manufacturers and superior technology, Audience is clearly the leader in advanced noise suppression for mobile handsets,” said Forest Baskett, General Partner at NEA. “We believe that Audience has the technology, the team and the business plan to become a highly successful semiconductor company.” 

Deployed in commercial handsets by LG, Pantech and Sharp, among others, the Audience Voice Processor leads the market for advanced noise suppression.  Audience Voice Processors are the first custom integrated circuits that are modeled after the most efficient and accurate auditory system, the human hearing system.  By 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.

“Continued funding from our existing investors demonstrates their confidence in our technology, products and early success in the market,” said Peter Santos, Audience president and CEO. “We will use this new financing to establish a dominant global position in voice quality enhancement through continued investment in R&D, extension of our voice processor product line, and expansion of our global operations.”

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 is already enabling people to be heard on mobile handsets throughout Japan and Korea. Audience was the Silver Winner in the 2008 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards and the Winner of the Semiconductor category. The company was included in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Semiconductors, 2008” and selected as the Most Innovative True Mobile Start-Up for the “2008 GSMA Mobile Innovation Global Awards.” Audience 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.