Veritonic Lands $3.2M Series A from Greycroft, Lerer Hippeau, Audible

Audio intelligence platform Veritonic has raised $3.2 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft, the company announced Wednesday.

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The new funding will be used to hire across departments, with data science and sales as a special focus. 

Veritonic, which is based in New York, helps marketing professionals better understand the best way to use sound. As audio becomes a bigger part of daily life through podcasts and streaming services, marketers need to know how to most effectively use the medium, in much the same way that they need to know how to advertise with other mediums, according to the company.

CEO Scott Simonelli, who has a background in composing music and advertising, described audio analytics as necessary for the field of audio to grow.

“That’s something that has to exist the way web analytics had to exist for the Internet to be what is today versus 1999,” Simonelli said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

“You think smart speakers, audio advertising and AirPods and all of a sudden there’s a whole bunch of brands and a whole bunch of consumers, and how do you measure that? How do you know what’s working and what’s not?” Simonelli said.

The company is also introducing its Veritonic Competitive Intelligence product, which gives marketers regular updates about how their competitors are using audio for marketing, and how they compare. 

Understanding response to sound is a core piece of every company, Simonelli said, and the company has clients who one might not think would seek out audio analytics. For example, one of the company’s clients is an auto company that tests out every sound its cars make.

Veritonic previously raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Newark Venture Partners in July 2018, according to Crunchbase. For the Series A, Lerer Hippeau and Amazon-owned audiobook marketplace Audible also participated in the round.

“We focused on investors that we didn’t have to have a conversation about why audio,” Simonelli said.  “You see firms that have a thesis around audio, they have a strategy around audio…they’re believers in what audio can do.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias