Jessica Powell: AI unlocks the enterprise audio market

Jessica Powell vividly remembers singing with her husband, Luke Miner, as they repeatedly inquired: “Why are the karaoke songbooks so slim? Why don’t we have all the songs in the world? Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could just sing along to any song you wanted?”

In 2013, that event occurred. Powell and Miner didn't establish AudioShake, a company focused on audio separation and processing technology, until 2021. Powell entered the world of startup founders from an unusual perspective: she worked at Google for eleven years, from 2007 to 2018, eventually heading communications for the search engine. Miner, a data scientist, had previously been employed at Plaid. Since 2021, Powell has served as CEO of AudioShake, and well before ChatGPT's release and the widespread adoption of voice AI, she was already utilizing AI for enterprise audio applications. 

“What we’re trying to do is make audio usable for both humans and machines,” Powell told Coins2Day. “That can mean super creative workflows, like film editing and music editing. But it can also mean things that the machines have to do, like being able to understand real-world audio.”

AudioShake, which now boasts over 40 enterprise clients, recently secured $14 million in seed funding, with Shine Capital spearheading the investment. (Thomson Reuters Ventures, Origin Ventures, Indicator Ventures, and Precursor Ventures also contributed to the round, bringing the startup's total funding to $19 million). Alex Hartz, a general partner at Shine, commended Powell as a “audiophile who combines the best characteristics of a gritty startup founder and seasoned executive.” She has successfully engaged enterprise clients in a rapidly changing sector, with Current AudioShake users including Universal Music, Disney Music Group, Warner Music Group, Warner Bros. Discovery, BET, and NFL Films, alongside “several Magnificent 7 companies.” As Powell notes, numerous highly intricate audio settings exist, spanning from films to industrial environments. 

“We specialize in noise,” said Powell. “A lot of that noise is really rich, beautiful noise. It could be a film or a piece of music. But audio has a high amount of frequency overlap, and a lot of unknown mixing conditions. And those are the kinds of technical challenges that you’re trying to solve.” 

Filipa Olmo, who leads content and community at YC-backed AI audio studio Wondercraft, stated that the company employs AudioShake to segment files into “individual audio components, which gives our users the freedom to edit and customize with our tools and voices.” Olmo characterized AudioShake’s technology as “foundational” and mentioned that the startup was “the only provider we found that could do this at the level of quality we needed.” This highlights a crucial point: the audio market represents a potentially vast, largely unrecognized sector. 

“The audio market is massive and counterintuitively larger than the video market,” Shine’s Hartz said via email. “By making audio as easy to edit as images, AudioShake has the opportunity to become core infrastructure across all audio use cases.” 

Term Sheet asked Powell: What’s next?

“Humans and machines have different superpowers, and if you can give each the other’s superpower, that’s really powerful,” she said. “If you can make it possible for a human to edit sound the way machines do, that opens up creative opportunities. If you help a machine understand the meaning of multiple sounds occurring simultaneously, that’s going to help deploy machines at the service of humans to do a variety of tasks we may not want to do, but that we can’t give machines today… There are so many things machines could do really well if they could see and hear like humans.” 

Coins2Day Brainstorm AI San Francisco… Jessica did an amazing AudioShake demo last year at Coins2Day Brainstorm AI in SF—and the event is back this year! On December 8th and 9th, we’ll be returning with a stellar lineup including Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, Glean CEO Arvind Jain, Amazon’s Panos Panay, and many more. Apply now to register.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: [email protected]
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Venture Deals

- Redwood Materialsa battery recycling and energy storage firm located in Sparks, Nevada, secured $350 million through Series E financing. Eclipse led the round and was joined by NVentures and others.

- Riff, an Oslo, Norway-based vibe coding platform designed for enterprise-grade applications, raised $16 million in Series A funding. Northzone led the round and was joined by Skyfall Ventures, Maki.vc, Sondo Capital, and others.

- Darwin AIa New York City-based company focused on assisting public sector agencies with the secure integration of AI has secured $15 million in Series A funding. The investment round was spearheaded by Insight Partners, with participation from UpWest and Resolute Ventures.

- Bricoa San Francisco-based AI-powered platform that automates state and federal licensing for financial institutions, secured $13.5 million in Series A funding. Flourish Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors Restive Ventures and Pear VC.

- Clerqa payments platform based in New York City that handles high-value transactions secured $12 million in Series A financing. 645 Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors FirstMark Capital, Fika Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Dash Fund.

- Wolf Gamesa Los Angeles, Calif.-based platform that employs AI for video game development secured $9 million in Series A financing. Main Street Advisors led the round and was joined by others.

- VitVioan AI-driven platform based in Boston, Mass., which autonomously coordinates operating room personnel and other hospital functions, secured $8 million in seed funding. Bek Ventures led the round and was joined by LDV Capital, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, and others.

- Tempoa Toronto, Canada-based AI-powered platform for engineers to collaborate on code, secured $5 million in seed funding from YCombinator, Golden Ventures, Box Group, Webflow Ventures, and others.

- OneAM, a New York City-based early pay platform, raised $4.7 million in seed funding. TTV Capital led the round and was joined by Correlation Ventures, ThirdStream Partners, and others.

- Tensormesha San Francisco-based platform focused on optimizing inference for enterprise AI secured $4.5 million in seed capital. Laude Ventures led the round.

- Rightchargea fleet electric vehicle charging payments platform based in London, U.K., secured £1.6 million ($2.1 million) in seed funding. Soulmates Ventures led the round and was joined by Blackwood Ventures, Unruly Capital, and Purple Ventures.

Private Equity

- AuditBoard, backed by Hg Capital, agreed to acquire FairNow, a Washington, D.C.-based AI governance platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

- National Safety Apparel, a portfolio company of Blue Point Capital Partners, acquired Gemtora Matawan, N.J.-based company specializing in fall protection and rescue gear. The financial details of the agreement were not made public.

People

- Acacia Partners, an Austin, Texas-based private equity firm, promoted Evan Kearns to vice president.

- BlueYard Capital, a Berlin, Germany-based venture capital firm, hired Mike Wax as a general partner. Previously, he served as CEO of Forto.

- Greenbelt Capital Partners, an Austin, Texas and New York City-based private equity firm, hired Katie Kersey as chief of strategy and operating partner, Erika Mapes as managing director, Austin Major as principal, and Elouise Roche as vice president.