This app removes background noise in calls in real-time; raises €7.4M as active users grew 20-fold in 2020

Armenian startup Krisp uses AI to weed out any background noise during any conference calls, or recordings. It has raised a $9M (approx €7.4M) Series A-1 led by RTP Global. Back in 2020, the company had completed $5M (approx €4.1M) in its Series A round from Storm Ventures, Sierra Ventures, TechNexus, and Hive Ventures.

Investors in this round

The current round was led by an early-stage venture capital firm, RTP Global. The round also saw participation from existing investor Storm Ventures – a B2B VC firm focused on enterprise investments.

What does Krisp offer?

When people work from home or outdoors, they have all kinds of distractions such as background noise, room echo, etc. And this where Krisp wants to make a difference. The startup’s AI-powered noise-cancelling application mutes background noise in calls and helps remote workers have productive noiseless business calls and remote meetings.

It was founded in 2017 by Artavazd Minasyan and Davit Baghdasaryan. Krisp’s technology is based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The process incorporates collecting datasets of 10,000 distinct noises and 3000 clean human voices of different gender, age, and ethnicity, which are mixed together and fed to the neural network.

The company saw tremendous growth last year, with active users growing 20-fold. Its tech works with Zoom, Meet and more than other 1000 apps out of the box.

In addition to the tech, the company is working on adding more features to the app to make team communications more effective. These range from transforming people’s voice to be more confident to developing intelligent nudges to help them to use more subtle words while speaking.

Use of the funds

The raised capital will be used to accelerate Krisp’s product development as well as make a number of strategic hires to support development, sales & marketing. 

The company says it will be growing its team from 95 to 170 by the end of this year and will also grow its AI audio research team from 25 to 45. The R&D team, based in Armenia, will continue to develop Krisp’s proprietary technology and drive product iterations. Besides, Krisp also looks to expand its sales and marketing teams in the US.

Davit Baghdasaryan, CEO & co-founder of Krisp, says, “Our goal is to help the world communicate more effectively, regardless of where they join a meeting from. Krisp’s proprietary technology helps people listen actively and be critical thinkers in real-time conversations despite the numerous distractions associated with remote working. This support from RTP Global and Storm Ventures will help us realise this mission. We’re also especially excited to leverage this fresh capital injection to grow our R&D team in Armenia, a lab we hope to turn into one of the largest of its kind in the world.”