Audience closes $15 Million in series D funding

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Mountain View: Voice processor company Audience raised $15 million in series D funding, bringing the total funding amount to date to $60 million. Existing investors including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Tallwood Venture Capital, Vulcan Capital and VentureTech Alliance funded the round. "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," he added. 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. Peter Santos, Audience president and CEO, said, "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."