Making Sound as Flexible as Text: How AudioShake Raised $14M to Unlock the World’s Audio

For most of history, once audio was recorded and mixed, it became essentially read-only. You could listen to a Nina Simone album, but you couldn’t separate her voice from the piano to create a new arrangement. You could watch a foreign film, but dubbing it meant choosing between preserving the original score or having clean dialogue. 

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That’s the challenge we set out to solve when we founded AudioShake. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $14 million in Series A funding, led by Shine Capital with participation from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Origin Ventures, Background Capital, returning investors Indicator Ventures and Precursor Ventures, and prominent angels like Bradley Horowitz and Charlie Songhurst. 

Our mission is simple: help advance human creativity as well as machine intelligence by making the world’s sound as flexible, editable, and programmable as text or images

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From a Tokyo Karaoke Bar to a San Francisco Start-up

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We first had the idea for AudioShake while karaokeing in Japan: Wouldn’t it be great if you could pull the vocals off any track and karaoke to any of the world’s songs? (I wanted “Damaged Goods, ”and Luke, my co-founder and CTO, “Do the Bartman.”)

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By 2020, advances in deep learning made tasks like this seem achievable. We began training models on a single Lambda machine, and were so excited when we heard the first results. As musicians, we knew of multiple workflows where the ability to separate recorded music would be really useful–remixing, sync licensing, immersive mixing, music education, and yes, karaoke. We launched in 2021, signing sync licensing departments in major and indie labels.

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Since that time, we’ve expanded across the music industry, as well as the film, broadcast, sports, and gaming industries–increasing the quality, speed, and breadth of our separation models. Today, our proprietary, state-of-the-art AI models can take any recording—whether a 50-year-old album, a sports broadcast, or a corporate meeting—and separate it into individual tracks: voices, instruments, sound effects, background noise, and more.

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Along the way, we’ve hit some incredible milestones:

• Nearly 400% year-over-year revenue growth
• More than 100 million minutes of audio processed this past year.
• A growing customer base of over 40 enterprise partners, including Disney Music Group, Warner Music Group, Universal Music, NFL Films, Warner Bros Discovery, and several of the “Mag 7” tech companies.
  
  

These aren’t just logos—they’re real use cases. Disney Music Group uses AudioShake to generate instrumentals for sync licensing, immersive mixes, and accurate lyric transcriptions. Sports teams, leagues, and organizations like NFL Films use our models to strip unlicensed music from archival footage, avoiding copyright fines. And AI companies are turning to AudioShake to isolate clean audio for inputs into Voice AI tech, or to structure audio datasets for training.

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In just a few years, we’ve established ourselves as the highest-quality, most trusted partner to some of the world’s largest media, entertainment, and technology companies. They’ve been our partners in deeply expansive ways–from unique training data partnerships, through to deep, mission-critical workflows that power some of the most engaging consumer experiences today. 

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This milestone wouldn’t have been possible without our incredible team, our first customers, and our earliest investors, who saw the kernel of what we were building, and trusted in us to build towards something larger.

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Why Audio Matters

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Audio represents one of the last great frontiers of unstructured data. As content creation explodes and AI reshapes every industry, the demand for flexible, editable, programmable audio has never been higher.

This funding will help us accelerate product development and expand our on-demand platform, APIs, and SDKs, making professional-grade audio separation accessible to any developer or creator. Whether you're building the next generation of AI models or reimagining how we interact with decades of recorded sound, we're here to help unlock that potential.

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If you're excited about shaping the future of audio, try our music models here or explore a range of speech, music, and film models on our Developer portal. We also offer real-time SDKs and an Enterprise platform for large customers.