DSP Concepts has successfully closed $28 million in an oversubscribed Series-C funding round, led by entrepreneur investor Yuchun Lee, with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Subaru, Porsche Digital, and others. With many years of CEO experience scaling companies into market leaders, Yuchun is now joining the DSP Concepts team as Executive Chairman.
A top Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Alumni In Technology, Yuchun Lee is the founder and CEO of Allego, a mobile video-based sales learning and development platform, and was previously the founder and CEO of Unica, an enterprise marketing management company that was acquired by IBM for $500 million. While at MIT, Yuchun Lee became famous for being a member of the MIT Blackjack Team that inspired the bestseller book Bringing Down the House and subsequent movie “21.”
Currently, Yuchun is also an Executive Partner with venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners; and a member of the board of directors of Vertex Pharmaceutical, a Fortune 500 company. His decision to invest in DSP Concepts confirms the strong momentum of the Silicon Valley based company, the creator of Audio Weaver and the underlying technology that supports engineers with real-time workflows to quickly stand up prototypes, collaborate and modify designs across teams, and deploy to the most popular chipsets from leading semiconductor companies including NXP, Qualcomm, STMicroelectronics, Cadence, Arm, and others. "DSP Concepts' unique technology and audio engineering talents have made it the clear leader in the emerging Audio of Things market," he states.
For Yuchun Lee, the Audio of Things concept represents the full range of audio processing technologies that deliver sound and voice features to any products with microphones and/or speakers, from TWS earbuds to a luxury electric car. And that's the vision that inspired him to lead the investment, with participation from new and previous investors including Sony Innovation Fund, Subaru, Porsche Digital, and others. The Series C funding will fuel DSP Concepts' continued growth and bring its total investment secured to $55 million.
Yuchun Lee has now joined DSP Concepts as Executive Chairman, enabling him to leverage his experience in scaling companies ranging from start-ups to publicly traded firms. "Leading companies in the automotive and consumer electronics industries rely on DSP Concepts solutions when they need to rapidly and reliably embed sound and voice features into their products. DSP Concepts' technology is quickly becoming the industry standard because it can dramatically reduce product development time and cost while appreciably improving audio performance and processing efficiency, opening up additional opportunities for product innovation," he adds.
"These additional funds will provide significant support to our continued expansion," says Chin Beckmann, CEO and co-founder of DSP Concepts. "We have grown our revenue by more than 100% since 2019 and are seeing our growth accelerate into 2022. The additional funding will help us keep ahead of audio technology trends and continue our effort in solving challenging acoustic and engineering problems for our customers and partners."
Unlike conventional audio feature development, DSP Concepts offers products and services that are processor agnostic and fully customizable. As the global appetite for audio continues to increase, helped in part by the technological advances in audio processing that DSP Concepts provides, market research firm Futuresource Consulting anticipates the market to grow at 5% CAGR (2021-2025), reaching a total of 4.1 billion devices by 2025.
www.dspconcepts.com
