A Berlin-based audio startup, which leverages its own AI models to let users generate synched sound for video, has raised $41m in a seed round, led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The funding round in Mirelo also lured in Berlin-based investor Atlantic and California-based VC TriplePoint Capital.
Mirelo has raised around $44m to date and has bagged angel investment from several tech luminaries, including Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch and Revolut executive Antoine Le Nel. Mirelo, which has a 10-strong team, was founded by a pair of former musicians, CJ Simon-Gabriel, and Florian Wenzel, who met as AI researchers at Amazon.
Mirelo’s big play is that while AI has transformed the creation of text, images and video, sound is lagging behind. It points out the laborious process of adding music and audio to visuals, involving creators and sound designers spending hours searching stock libraries and manually syncing effects.
Mirelo, founded in 2023, has developed its own AI models for sound in video. It says a user can upload any video, and in a matter of seconds, Mirelo produces matching audio for anything happening on screen. It says its sound generation tech is a good fit for AI-generated videos or the gaming worlds.
It builds its own AI models from scratch, training them on data for which it says it has licensing deals in place. Its customers are typically individual creators and small studios while its API is used by companies wanting to leverage its models into their platforms or tools.
Mirelo recently released a new video-to-sound model, Mirelo SFX v1.5, which it says can generate various soundtrack versions faster than real-time.
The startup says its models require 50 times less compute than typical LLMs. The startup will use the funds to advance its tech and try and grow its customer base.
Simon-Gabriel, Mirelo CEO, said: “Think of the difference between talkies and silent films – video without sound has so much less feeling and atmosphere.
“Mirelo’s first step is about democratising access, empowering everyone to create the sound that their (AI) videos deserve.
“But we’ll also empower professionals to rework audio, to do more of what they love, to be more expressive and imaginative in what they can achieve, while handling the boring stuff such as synchronisation. Our bigger mission is to become the audio layer for all visual content across videos, gaming, social media, films and beyond.”
Wenzel said: “There’s a deep affinity between music and engineering; maybe that’s why so many of Mirelo’s team are musicians, and why musicians have always been early adopters of new technology.
“There’s something about the intersection of mathematical precision and expressiveness that seems to draw people to both fields.”
Guido Appenzeller, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said: “To date, a16z has invested in multiple world-leading generative models each with a different focus area. Mirelo is tackling one of the most technically challenging and least explored areas of generative media: a specialised model for sound effect creation.
“CJ and Florian have assembled a research-driven team whose breakthroughs in tokenisation, data curation, and conditioning rival far larger efforts and we’re excited to back Mirelo as they scale their technology for the next generation of video models.”
