Denis Thébaud Joins Board as Ircam Amplify Completes Seed Round of 3 Million Euros

Denis Thébaud, CEO of Qobuz and Innelec Multimedia and Co-Founder of Focus Home Interactive, will help Ircam Amplify revolutionize everyday uses of sound by joining the prestigious Board of Directors for this exciting new venture that recently completed a 3-million-euro seed funding round in less than a year.

Ircam Amplify gains another investor to support its efforts in tackling daily modern sound revolutions by accelerating the industrialization of Ircam’s exceptional audio technologies. Numeric Pipeline, a subsidiary of Nabuboto (a Denis Thébaud holding), joins Ircam, La Banque des Territoires, Believe, and E.T.R.E. in backing Ircam Amplify.

Created in July 2019, Ircam Amplify was born out of France’s “Culture, Heritage, and Digital Technology” program, which is operated by Banque des Territoires. Ircam Amplify is the commercial subsidiary of Ircam, a globally renown research institute that houses the largest sound and music R&D laboratory in France. For over 40 years, Ircam has perfectly embodied the Art-Science-Technology continuum and today Ircam Amplify extends that continuum to include real-life applications and services.  

Ircam Amplify aims to become the go-to enterprise for commercial uses of sound.  With a humanistic and holistic vision of audio technologies, Ircam Amplify is committed to creating user-centered sound experiences that are personalized and comprehensive. By supporting companies through this new era of speech and sound, Ircam Amplify provides the business world with solutions that respond to the rapidly growing demand for new uses of audio technology.

In just two years, Ircam Amplify has over 30 B-to-B customers in numerous sectors:

• Luxury and Retail (including L’Oréal and Groupe Fiminco)
• Cultural Industries (including Believe, Théâtre du Châtelet, Philharmonie de Paris, MK2, Audirvana, Focusrite, UVI, and Amadeus)
• Transportation
• Health (including MGEN)
• Robotics / IoT

As of early 2021, Ircam Amplify has a diverse team of more than 10 people including developers, sound designers, project managers and expert product managers.

Ircam Amplify is a global company with products and services for the entire value chain: from content creation, to the implementation of groundbreaking audio features, to psycho-acoustic assessments. Based on Ircam’s research, Ircam Amplify’s offerings include exciting innovations like the MetaSound suite, created for use in cultural and creative industries, which contains sound indexing and music recommendation technology, as well as automatic audio-quality assessment. Ircam Amplify also provides:

• State-of-the-art audio technologies via software licenses
• Expert audio services for the development of innovative products
• Custom “Sound Experience Design” consultations for interface sounds and brand differentiation

I am convinced that our independence, our development as Europeans, requires the creation of ecosystems rooted in the industrial and cultural projects of local companies and this is Ircam Amplify’s ambition for the audio world. More than ever, unity is strength.

Denis Thébaud