Iceland's Treble raises $18M to expand voice simulation platform

Existing investors KOMPAS VC, Frumtak Ventures, EIC, and Omega ehf also participated in the round. Treble received $12 million in 2024. The company was founded in 2020 by acoustic engineers Finnur Pind and Jesper Pedersen. Its customers include Amazon and Logitech.

Voice AI has become one of the hottest sectors in artificial intelligence, with investors pouring billions of dollars into uses such as automating customer support and sales calls, creating meeting notetakers, and developing AI smart glasses that rely on voice as the primary interaction surface. AI labs are releasing models quickly, and hardware makers are competing to create better consumer experiences. That growth requires testing and a feedback loop for improvement, and Treble is positioning itself at the center of that process.

Treble operates several verticals related to simulation and data. For voice AI companies, it offers a synthetic data generation platform that can be used for speech enhancement, noise suppression, and model training. It also evaluates voice AI models in different conditions to give feedback to labs. Earlier this year, it partnered with Hugging Face to launch a benchmark for speech recognition models across different realistic conditions.

"Audio AI is really a data challenge, and this is where the most opportunities to enable next-generation models and hardware lie. To date, pretty much all sound-related AI has been made from recordings and data scraped from the internet. We believe that accurate physics simulation can be an alternative way to create data for sound," Pind told TechCrunch.

The startup also focuses on hardware design and testing from a voice perspective. It works with headphone and speaker companies on virtual prototyping to help them understand how their products might sound. It can test how a smart speaker understands commands based on the speaker's positioning. More recently, Treble has moved into simulation testing for smart glasses and AI devices.

Pind said the company is excited to work on wearables that could enhance hearing for users. "I'm really excited about the next generation of these devices like headphones and smart glasses that can enable [a feature like] superhuman hearing. That's an area where you can really just hear better in challenging acoustic environments. Maybe you are in a restaurant, and you only want to hear people within two meters of range, or you are in a seminar, and want to mute people around you," he said.

Treble aims to increase its focus on the physical AI space, including robotics, automotive, and drone companies, to enable sound-based functions for them through testing and simulation.

Francois Ruether, vice president of Paladin Capital Group, told TechCrunch that Treble's platform, which simulates different models and devices, stands out, and that its importance will increase as it gets involved in more areas. "Our thesis is that, as more products depend on understanding sound, this infrastructure becomes increasingly valuable across voice AI, wearables, robotics, and physical AI. Customers retain ownership of their models, products, and development workflows, while benefiting from a shared foundation of a simulation-native acoustic infrastructure layer," Ruether said.