Term Sheet Next: Jessica Powell on how AI unlocks the massive enterprise audio market
AudioShake is a startup with roots in a Tokyo karaoke bar.
Jessica Powell vividly recalls singing with her friend, Luke Miner, as they kept asking: “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?”
That was in 2013. Powell and Miner wouldn’t co-found AudioShake—which specializes in audio separation and processing technology—until 2021. Powell came to startup founder life from a unique vantage point: She was at Google from 2007 through 2018, ultimately leading communications at the search giant (Miner’s a data scientist, who previously worked at Plaid). Since 2021, Powell has been CEO of AudioShake and long before ChatGPT came out and voice AI hit the mainstream, she was using AI focused on audio use cases in enterprises.
“What we’re trying to do is make audio usable for both humans and machines,” Powell told Fortune. “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, already with more than 40 enterprise customers, recently raised its $14 million seed round, led by Shine Capital. (Thomson Reuters Ventures, Origin Ventures, Indicator Ventures, and Precursor Ventures also participated in the round, which brought the startup’s total capital raised to $19 million). Alex Hartz, Shine general partner, praised Powell as an “audiophile who combines the best characteristics of a gritty startup founder and seasoned executive.” And she has indeed made inroads with enterprise customers in a fast-evolving market—current AudioShake customers include Universal Music, Disney Music Group, Warner Music Group, Warner Bros. Discovery, BET and NFL Films, along with “several Magnificent 7 companies.” There are, as Powell points out, so many extremely complex audio environments, whether that’s in films or on factory floors.
“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, head of content and community at YC-backed AI audio studio Wondercraft, said that the company uses AudioShake to break files into “individual audio components, which gives our users the freedom to edit and customize with our tools and voices.” Olmo described AudioShake’s technology as “foundational” and said that the startup was “the only provider we found that could do this at the level of quality we needed.” Which gets at something essential: The audio market is perhaps among the great unseen, massive markets.
“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.”
Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco…Jessica did an amazing AudioShake demo last year at Fortune 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: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com