Capital funds business development

Acoustic Technologies has closed on $13.8 million in its third round of funding.

Acoustic Technologies has closed on $13.8 million in its third round of funding.

The cash will be used to fund additional new product development and to grow sales and technical support resources to respond to the increasing demand for the company's new products.

"Acoustic's SoundClear products for improved voice quality offer a unique value proposition to makers of cellular handsets, hands-free car kits, and other speakerphone enabled telephone products", commented Bill Turner, Managing Director and cofounder of Signature Capital Management.

"Like Acoustic's customers, our investor network saw the value and responded by purchasing all shares offered.

We are delighted to work with Acoustic Technologies and help raise the capital they need to grow their business".

"We believe our business is poised for rapid revenue growth as we move our products from development to design-in and production.

Customer activity is high, especially with cellular handset vendors, and the additional capital should fund us through business development and production ramp", said Samuel Thomasson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Acoustic Technologies.

"Signature Capital has an impressive investment track record.

We are pleased to have their network of investors as our financial partners bringing us capital as well as relationships and industry insight that is critical to our success".

A limitation to existing speakerphone-enabled cell-phones is the unnatural way they deal with echo.

The way to solve echo and background noise for normal cellular handset use is very different from the solution when in speakerphone mode.

Many existing cellular speakerphones simply use the same handset echo cancellation techniques in this more complex speakerphone environment.

As a result, the communication becomes choppy and part of the meaning is easily lost.

For speakerphone operation, more performance is needed to achieve good voice quality, speech intelligibility, and full-duplex communication.

Full-duplex communication refers to natural conversation flow - just like a face-to-face conversation.

Without full-duplex capability, conversations can be fatiguing and people find they must use extreme concentration just to understand the dialogue.

Also, people must wait for pauses in conversation in order to interrupt the other speaker.

Full-duplex operation helps eliminate the misunderstanding that comes from lost syllables or word clipping.

Cellular users, network operators, and telephone manufacturers are demanding products that solve the problems of poor voice quality caused by echoes and harsh noise environments.

Acoustic Technologies' unique SoundClear products enable natural full-duplex voice communication for cellular and desktop speakerphone applications.

SoundClear uses a combination of patented techniques including echo cancellation, noise reduction, and sound enhancement along with voice activity detection and non-linear processing to offer clear and natural bidirectional speakerphone operation.

The Acoustic Technologies SoundClear solutions are implemented as DSP software for mobile applications and as ICs for use in other telephony products such as hands-free car kits, Bluetooth products, VoIP phones, and conference phones.

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