Iceland's Treble raises $18M to simulate sound for AI and hardware makers

Voice AI has become one of the hottest sectors in AI, with investors pouring billions of dollars into use cases like automated customer support and sales calls, meeting notetakers, and AI smart glasses that rely on voice as the primary interface. As AI labs release models quickly and hardware makers race to build better voice experiences, all of that technology needs testing and a feedback loop for improvement — which is where Treble is positioning itself.

The Iceland-based startup, founded in 2020 by acoustic engineers Finnur Pind and Jesper Pedersen, has raised $18 million in an extension of its Series A, led by Paladin Capital Group with participation from existing investors KOMPAS VC, Frumtak Ventures, EIC, and Omega ehf. It previously raised $12 million in 2024, bringing its total raise to over $40 million. Treble counts Amazon and Logitech as customers.

Treble builds a synthetic data generation platform for voice AI companies, used for speech enhancement, noise suppression, and model training, and it also evaluates voice AI models under different conditions to give feedback to labs; earlier this year it partnered with Hugging Face to launch a benchmark for speech recognition models across realistic conditions. “Audio AI is really a data challenge, and this is where the most opportunities to enable next-generation models and hardware lie,” Pind told TechCrunch. “We believe that accurate physics simulation can be an alternative way to create data for sound.”

The company also works on hardware design and testing, helping headphone and speaker makers with virtual prototyping and testing how smart speakers understand commands based on speaker placement. Treble has recently expanded into simulation testing for smart glasses and AI devices, and Pind said he’s excited about wearables that could enable “superhuman hearing” — for instance, isolating voices within a set range in a noisy restaurant or muting people during a seminar. The startup aims to expand further into physical AI, including robotics, automotive, and drone companies.

Why it matters

As voice becomes the primary interface for AI devices and wearables, testing infrastructure like Treble’s could become a chokepoint that hardware and model makers depend on rather than building in-house — a bet its investors are backing with a fourth funding round in two years.