Rotterdam-based Voicy, an online content platform for discovering, creating and sharing sound-clips and sound effects, has secured €1.2 million in pre-seed funding. The investment round was led by Oliver Samwer’s Global Founders Capital.
Also, senior executives from a host of leading tech companies, including Jeronimo Folgueira (CEO, Deezer), Sven Ahrens (director of global growth, Spotify), Oskar Serrander (COO, Acast), David Vismans (former CPO, Booking), Sunita Kaur (senior VP at Twitch, former director at Facebook), Mike Sackler (Founder and partner, VC Supernode Global) and serial investor Wouter Kneepkens participated in the round.
Voicy eyes growth
This funding round will be used by Voicy to build its team, improve its product offering and securing partnerships with some of the world’s leading apps and communication platforms. Also, it eyes to expand its presence across Europe and the US.
Recently, Voicy signed a partnership with Viber with users having sent over 20 million audio messages, which have been played together 100 million times in only three months.
Xander Kanon, Co-Founder and CEO of Voicy, said: “There is a communication shift happening in which shorter formats of content have become more important and popular than ever before. First you had emojis, then you had GIFs and now you have ‘Voicies’. Our partnership with Viber showcases how quickly and easily major platforms can integrate with Voicy using a simple universal API.”
.
Soheil Mirpour from Global Founders Capital, said: “Voicy is a very exciting new startup. In short order, their strong team has grown a huge community of very active users who are creating hundreds of pieces of new audio content every day. There’s a massive amount of potential for short audio in social communication. A Discord user spends on average 285 minutes a day in a Discord voice chat, people share 7 billion voice messages per day on Whatsapp alone and billions of people use short audio in their Tiktok or Instagram videos. Voicy brings a new concept to the table, which is ready to disrupt an enormous market – we knew we had to invest.”
Sven Ahrens, Director of Global Growth at Spotify, said: “Voicy combines the most interesting trends in user-generated audio content for messaging and gaming – what is there not to love? Every messaging, media and gaming platform is trying to get audio interactions right, and with Voicy they have the perfect tool right in front of them. Fueled by a fervent community of soundboard creators, people from all over the world can now send quick reactions and emotions as sounds. No matter what app they’re in.”
Giphy of audio!
Voicy was founded in October 2020 in Rotterdam by Xander Kanon, Joey de Kruis and Milan Kokir. Its mission is to do for sound clips what GIPHY has done for GIFs.
Voicy has two sides to its business. Firstly, it enables users to create or use a library of short audio messages or sound effects, which can then be downloaded, shared or messaged. The next aspect is its instant integration with consumer apps and social platforms, which enable users to search and send sound clips and audio GIFs as part of their existing chat function.
Within a year, the company has built a community of 1.1 million regular users who have created a database of 125,000 unique sounds totalling an average of 35 million monthly plays. What’s more, 10,000 new sounds are added each month.
