iZotope, software behind Rolling Stones, Inception + more, receives $7.5m in financing
Renowned music software company iZotope Inc. have received their largest financing yet to help its expansion into new markets.
The Cambridge based company has it’s roots in MIT in where a group of undergrads conceived it in 2001 as a free plug-in of a record simulator. Now 15 years later the company’s software has been responsible for records by massive stars like Skrillex, a remaster of a Rolling Stones record, the Inception soundtrack and much, much more.
It’s not just popular with it’s users though, it’s success has led to $7.5 million in new financing, raising iZotope’s total venture funding to $14.5 million. The fresh funding comes from ABS Capital Partners, who invested $2.5 million in equity, and Comerica Bank, who are loaning iZotope $5 million.
iZotope are primarily producers of plugins that can be used with various DAW music production software like Ableton, Pro Tools, Apple Logic, Cubase, and others. They’ve been expanding into different areas recently, having released a free site of games that will help train your ears just last month. They say that will use this new funding to expand into new markets, though what that could entail hasn’t been revealed.
iZotope’s most renowned program, that has earned it notoriety with TV and filmmakers, allows the user to analyse and edit sound to an unmatched depth. iZotope’s CEO, Mark Ethier said: “We are like Photoshop but for sound.” He’s not wrong either, their popular software allows you view every sound as a spectrogram that can split up separate sounds, where they would normally all appear in a single waveform.
For example say you’re recording some live drums and the guitarist shouts an insult at the drummer during recording. If the microphone picked that up, you could use iZotope’s software to analyse the track and find the sound of the guitarist shouting and, essentially, erase it.
CEO Ethier went on to say: “We have a dedicated team of people researching new technology in the deep learning and machine learning realm.”