Copenhagen-based Augmented Hearing Ltd., a DeepTech startup pioneering advanced speech understanding for high-stakes communication environments, today announced the successful closing of a €3 million Seed funding round.
The investment was led by Crowberry Capital, a Nordic VC firm with offices in Iceland and Denmark, and included a few strategic positioned scale investors as well.
The funding will be used to scale the global adoption of Sharpi v.1.0, Augmented Hearing’s AI solution designed to enhance speech intelligibility in critical settings such as emergency call centres and air traffic control towers.
“None of these centers use similar speech enhancement technologies,” said Mette Carstensen, CEO and Co-founder of Augmented Hearing. “Sharpi 1.0 significantly outperforms alternative solutions. It improves operator focus, reduces cognitive stress, and ultimately helps save lives.”
Founded in 2020 by Martin Bergmann, Mette Louise V. Carstensen, and Christian Ravn, Augmented Hearing brings together decades of experience in the Danish audio industry and in cognitive systems research at the Technical University of Denmark.
With a combination of expertise in AI, psychoacoustics, software development, and cyber security, they are dedicated to transforming cutting-edge research into practical, real-world products.
“Unlike traditional methods, Sharpi v.1.0 has been trained on millions of voice samples, enabling it to isolate and understand human speech in even the most chaotic acoustic environments,” said Martin Bergmann, CTO and Co-founder. “It’s not just an upgrade – it’s a revolution in voice recognition.”
Their AI-driven solutions remove noise, recognise speech, and adapt to the user preferences, creating an audio experience that ensure a “100% up-time and a 100% privacy in real-time“.
“This funding marks an exciting next phase in our journey,” continued Carstensen. “We aim to become the global standard in critical speech understanding and eventually expand into consumer applications like earbuds and hearing aids. The market potential is enormous, and we’re ready to lead.”
Augmented Hearing is already active in 112-centres in several countries, including Iceland, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland, with expansion into additional markets underway.
Sharpi v.1.0 is powered by a neural network trained to emulate – and reportedly surpass – human auditory processing.
“We are incredibly excited about backing Augmented Hearing,” said Hekla Arnardottir, Founding Partner at Crowberry Capital. “With a strong industrial experience from Oticon/Demant the team is able to deliver a mission-critical solution that improves safety and performance in some of the most important communication contexts in the world.”