FreeS Fund Angel-Round Portfolio Company SoundAI Technology Closes RMB 200 Million Series B Round | FreeS Funding News

" Investor Perspective

Yizhou Zhu, Director at FreeS Fund

Email: yzz@freesvc.com

Starting in 2018, pure algorithm-driven AI startups began to cool off. People realized there was no magical algorithm that could solve problems overnight. As expectations for algorithms recalibrated, it became clear that AI technology had to be deeply integrated with industry know-how.

In the process of deploying AI technology, there was substantial demand for industry-specific customization with limited scalability — but this actually gave startups room to grow steadily and build moats. AI companies with strong industry service capabilities, like SoundAI, would only become more commercially valuable over time.

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SoundAI recently completed a 200 million RMB Series B funding round, led by Yida Capital with follow-on investments from FreeS Fund and Zhengju Capital, plus participation from ZGC Bank and InnoVen Capital. In May 2016, FreeS Fund led SoundAI's angel round.

Following this round, SoundAI will continue investing in cutting-edge acoustic technology and AI-powered interactive technology R&D, continuously uncovering user needs, maintaining rapid iteration of new technologies, refining product user experience to the extreme, expanding platform services to more voice-enabled vertical scenarios, providing users with more high-quality voice interaction technology and language intelligence services, and accelerating business expansion across industries as well as large-scale deployment of products and platform services.

Founded in April 2016, SoundAI is one of the world's leading technology innovators in acoustic voice technology and language intelligence services. The company primarily provides intelligent interactive systems and services based on SoundAI Azero, as well as intelligent interactive solutions including chips, modules, development boards, and complete products. Currently, SoundAI's self-developed intelligent interactive system SoundAI Azero — which integrates far-field voice interaction and far-field real-time communication technology — has been widely deployed across smart home, smart automotive, smart security, smart finance, smart education, smart healthcare, smart courts, smart transportation, and robotics industries, serving customers including Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, Lenovo, Skyworth, Kingdee, Inspur, XGIMI, Gome, ChaoGe, China Mobile, Qihoo 360, and China National Radio.

Since its founding, SoundAI has remained focused on cutting-edge acoustic technology and AI-powered interaction, committed to pushing intelligent interaction from near-field to far-field, leading the development trend of far-field voice interaction technology in China, and achieving real-world deployment of intelligent voice interaction products. SoundAI's core team has further integrated physical acoustics with deep learning to build an entirely new technical architecture, accommodating more complex acoustic scenarios for both near-field and far-field applications, providing a full-stack technology chain spanning chips, devices, and cloud — including intelligent acoustic sensing, far-field acoustic processing (echo cancellation, noise suppression, sound source localization, dereverberation, beamforming), far-field voice wake-up, far-field voiceprint recognition, far-field speech recognition, far-field full-duplex communication, contextual semantic understanding, natural speech synthesis, ultra far-field acoustic monitoring, local-field speech recognition, distributed-field voice interaction, deep learning and few-shot learning, acoustic chip design, and other technologies — solving critical user experience issues in real-world scenarios such as far-field voice wake-up and recognition, far-field voiceprint recognition, audio-video fusion interaction, and multi-person tracking and recognition.

Beyond maintaining continuous technological iteration to help users deploy new scenarios, SoundAI has devoted even more energy to refining products and platform services. The global intelligent voice market is currently booming: a Strategy Analytics research report noted that global smart speaker shipments grew 197% year-over-year in Q3 2018, reaching a record 22.7 million units, with usage expected to exceed 100 million in the final quarter of that year. The recognition and entry of global internet giants into the voice赛道 further accelerated the maturation of the entire AI voice industry. AI must be exquisitely designed — only when products and technology are perfectly integrated to create killer platform application services can user experience be guaranteed and user needs be continuously uncovered.

SoundAI will further unleash its integrated hardware-software technical capabilities to help traditional manufacturing industries upgrade their product design and production technologies. With highly reliable wide-scenario adaptability, minimalist standard configuration modes, and ease of standardization and large-scale adoption — combined with years of accumulated experience in hardware-software product mass production and supply chain advantages — the company will solve users' difficulties in deploying voice solutions across different scenarios and address the volume-based promotion needed for platform service monetization, systematically engineering mature theories into real products that we can see everywhere in daily life, improving our lives and meeting our needs in every aspect.

As a provider of acoustic voice technology and language intelligence services, SoundAI will continue upholding its technical philosophy of "Hearing What You Say, Knowing What You Think," partnering with sensor manufacturers, chip makers, production vendors, content providers, and other collaborators to drive technology upgrades for partners in physical industries through AI innovation technology and services, achieving its mission of "Connecting Wisdom to the Future Through Sound" and its vision of "More Free Human-Machine Interconnection" by continuously leading human-machine interaction experiences in real-world environments.