Voice isolation specialist IRIS Audio Technologies has raised £5.6 million in a Series A funding round.
The UK-headquartered company will use the investment to drive adoption of its IRIS Clarity solution globally and in particular North America.
The investment round was led by Puma Private Equity and is IRIS Audio’s first institutional investment to date. Existing investors the Ojjeh family, TAG Group and Toby Brzoznowski also participated in the round.
Brzoznowski, who co-founded LLamasoft and subsequently grew it to a successful $1.5 billion acquisition in 2020, has both invested and joined the business as EVP Americas to tap into the huge growth potential in the region and drive its rapid growth.
IRIS Audio is an audio technology company with a suite of patented products that leverages decades of research into the effects of sound on the brain. Its flagship product, IRIS Clarity, uses the most advanced AI to remove background noise from calls.
It claims that this shortens average handling time by up to 11%, reduces sound-proofing costs by more than 50%, eliminates noise-related complaints from both customers and agents by 98% and improves transcription accuracy — and thereby speech analytics — by more than 10%.
IRIS Audio’s Software-as-a-Service solutions have been developed in partnership with Goldsmiths University and Mount Sinai university hospital, using research on the neurological effects of audio stimuli to develop technology that’s proven to stimulate the brain and enable active listening.
It is used by call centres and sports teams including F1’s Red Bull Racing.
“As organisations from public services to motor racing and call centres become ever more virtual in how they communicate, our mission is to make critical communications clearer, more effective and less taxing by eradicating background noise,” said Jacobi Anstruther, founder & CEO at IRIS.
“We want to help contact centre staff deliver more resolutions and motorsports teams win more races through higher quality digital communications. This funding round is a significant step in enabling that.”
Harriet Rosethorn, investment director at Puma Private Equity, added: “We’re hugely excited to be partnering with IRIS Audio Technologies, a business that we believe has huge capacity to scale.
“IRIS Audio’s unique technology has already proven to have demonstrable benefits to the contact centres it serves and the breadth of use cases for its technology gives it a significant addressable market.
“The company benefits from a truly exceptional leadership team, and we’re excited to be part of the journey.”
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