Voice AI has emerged as one of the hottest sectors in AI, with investors pouring in billions of dollars to serve use cases ranging from automating customer support and sales calls to creating meeting notetakers and developing AI smart glasses that use voice as the primary interaction surface. Meanwhile, AI labs are quickly releasing models, and hardware makers are trying to create the best experience for consumers to interact with devices. All of this new technology needs testing and a feedback loop for improvement.
An Iceland-based startup, Treble , is positioning itself to be at the center of the voice AI industry by creating a simulation platform that can cater to model makers, robotics companies, and consumer hardware makers. The company, founded in 2020 by acoustic engineers Finnur Pind and Jesper Pedersen, has raised $18 million in an extension of its Series A funding led by Paladin Capital Group, with participation from existing investors KOMPAS VC, Frumtak Ventures, EIC, and Omega ehf. It received an investment of $12 million in 2024, bringing its total raise to date to over $40 million.
The startup counts Amazon and Logitech as customers. Treble has a few verticals related to simulation and data. For voice AI companies, it has a synthetic data generation platform that could be used for speech enhancement, noise suppression, and model training. It also evaluates voice AI models in different conditions to provide feedback to labs. Earlier this year, it partnered with Hugging Face to launch a benchmark for speech recognition models across different realistic conditions . "Audio AI is really a data challenge, and this is where the most opportunities to enable next-generation models and hardware lie.
To date, pretty much all sound-related AI has been made from recordings and data scraped from the internet. We believe that accurate physics simulation can be an alternative way to create data for sound," Pind told TechCrunch. The startup also focuses on hardware design and testing from a voice perspective. For instance, it works with headphone and speaker companies for virtual prototyping to help them understand how their product might sound. It could also test how a smart speaker can understand commands based on the positioning of the speaker.