It’s clearly the week for starry seed investors. Snafu Records has Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog but another new startup, Iris, can boast Queen drummer Roger Taylor as one of its early backers.
Its promise: “a revolutionary new audio technology that heightens audio quality whilst simultaneously activating the brain”, which (if all goes well) will be integrated by partners including streaming services, wellness apps, headphones and speakers.
Music company Concord is another of Iris’s early backers. The tech boils down to something Iris is branding as ‘active listening’.
At more length: “The patented algorithm unlocks and resynthesizes lost audio information allowing the listeners brain to play an active role in piecing it together, recreating the original live music experience”.
Iris will initially be available as its own iPhone app, open to the public in March (it’s on the App Store now, but requires an invitation to use) with Android to follow in April. Clearly, the bigger scale will come through those integrations or (we’ll assume this is a possible corporate goal) an acquisition by a streaming service or hardware firm in the future.
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