Top of the lyne - Krisp.ai: The noisefighting superhero
Krisp.ai: The noisefighting superheroThe product-led growth of the noise-suppression rocketship that grew its active users by 20x, enterprise accounts by 23x, and ARR by 13x in ONE year - and continues to ascendMarc Cenedella believes that we’re witnessing the largest societal change since the end of the second world war. The CEO of the online job search service Ladders says that the writing is on the wall. Remote work isn’t [Fluffy the dog goes woof woof in the background] going anywhere. According to the company’s projections, 25% of all jobs in North America will be fully remote by the end of the [fire engine sirens blaring] current year. And that number will continue to increase in 2023. The largest societal shift since the last world war has had many knockdown effects on the way we navigate our professional lives. In the sanctuary [the Succession opening song plays in the other room] of our homes, optimizing for time and productivity has become part of the gig. Our calendars are holy to us, our inboxes sanctum sanctorum, and pants, optional. Free access to PLG tools like [the neighbor turns on an 18th-century leaf blower, antique] Calendly, Clockwise, Slack, Superhuman, and Zoom promised to boost our productivity - and they did. But who among us [phone rings, but instead of the iPhone ringtone, it’s Gojira’s Art of Dying] hasn’t dialed into a call where the cacophony on show might have put a mosh pit to shame? Davit Baghdasaryan and Artavazd Minasyan noticed way back in 2017 that there was an emerging trend of enablement of communications, but none addressing the quality of communications. They set out to slay a proven productivity killer - a constant feature of every second call you’re likely to hop on today - background noise. Their weapon? The krispNet Deep Neural Network that powers Krisp.ai. 2Hz: The origins 🐣Back in 2017, Davit was at the approximate center of the emergence of companies enabling communications - he was head of product security at Twilio. His friend, Artavazd (Arto), a Ph.D. in Mathematics, was digging into machine learning and was looking for an interesting problem statement to solve. So when Davit pointed out to Arto that background noise and busy video backgrounds were constant features of his conference calls at Twilio, Arto’s ears pricked up. He gave Stepan Sargsyan - their current Chief Scientist - a ring, and in the next six months, fired up a prototype of their noise-cancellation technology. It was far from perfect. But it was years ahead of the tech that existed at the time. The trio came together and incorporated 2Hz Inc, raised $500K from UC Berkeley’s Skydeck accelerator, and then a $1.5 M round led by Sierra Ventures and Shanda Group. The idea was simple: Mix a large dataset of common background noises and another large dataset of clean human voices, and you’re left with two very useful datasets - noisy human speech and the clean speech output for the same. Upon feeding these two datasets as input and output, 2Hz’s KrispNet Deep Neural Network was able to create a mask that filters out the noise and leaves the human voices intact. All of this magic happens on the device, and with minimal latency - ~15 milliseconds. As opposed to Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), which typically requires multi-microphone headphones, 2Hz’s noise suppression could run on most devices, with very little overhead. And unlike ANC, it could suppress noise that goes from your background to the person you’re talking to over the call, while also suppressing the background noises from their end. 2Hz has since rebranded to Krisp.ai, and today supports the cancellation of a range of background noises including:
Krisp has also moved to leverage useful metadata from calls to report useful analytics on virtual meetings including “talk-time”, call participation (how often did you speak up on a call?), and other meeting insights. Krisp works at the level of your OS’s sound processing and integrates easily into all the common communication tools - take your pick from the 800+ supported apps. The Armenian-American start-up raised its latest round of funding in February 2021 - a Series A round that in total amounts to $14M. The $9M Series A-1 round was led by RTP Global with participation from existing investor Storm Ventures. Krisp’s PLG flywheel ⚙️The latest round of funding arrived on the back of the company clocking some enviable growth numbers: In 2020, Krisp saw a 20x increase in active users, a 23x increase in enterprise accounts, and a 13x lift in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Although the growth spurt was largely aided by the onset of remote work, the noise around Krisp was not a 2020 phenomenon. The company had already gone from 0 to 600 paying enterprises, and $0 to $4 million ARR, in a single year. Let’s dissect their early growth. Pivoting to the consumer 👩🏻💻Davit and Arto originally envisioned Krisp as something that could be sold directly to mobile network providers, or even the Skypes, Zooms, and WebExes of the world. The duo realized soon that for this business model to work, they would need to ramp up their resources, experience, and networks. And that was going to take time.
With a version that runs on the Mac and in true product-led fashion, Davit and Arto went straight to the consumer instead. An early tryst with enterprise 🤝Krisp went live with a freemium pricing model early. Even today, the free tier offers up to 90 minutes of the core offering for free daily. Early on, Krisp’s revenue was entirely driven by the B2C use case. That changed in December 2019, when they started onboarding enterprise customers. By March 2020, their biggest customer was a tech giant with 2,000 employees. Think 2,000 Krisp licenses. 🤑
Davit and Arto realized that the meat was in the B2B motion and baked governance and security features that enterprise buyers demand into the product. By early 2021, B2B revenues overshadowed the B2B stream by some distance. Krisp today powers noise-cancellation tech at organizations like Sony, GitHub, NASA, Accenture, and more. Hunt, Hack, and Sumo - spike events through launches 🚀Krisp solved a very real pain point for remote workers, gamers, and digital nomads around the globe. Their DNN-powered tech was at least two years ahead of the rest of the world, which meant nobody else was addressing this unique pain point. Krisp’s early battle was one of discovery: getting a craving market to discover a bleeding-edge product that solved a very real problem for them in a unique way. A strong 1-2-3 punch of ProductHunt, HackerNews, and AppSumo helped boost discovery early on. ProductHunt: Krisp for Mac first launch on product hunt in November 2018, and ended the day as #1, the week as #3, and the month as #4. The team would come back to PH 6 more times, and bag 11 badges overall including the Golden Kitty Award for Product of the Year twice - in 2018 and 2020. Hackernews: Krisp’s launch on HN got the “HN hug” - the post stayed on the front page of HN for more than 14 hours. Appsumo: Appsumo deals is a platform of ~800k tech enthusiasts who hunt for lifetime deals on software. Krisp launched on the platform in August 2019 and spurred a wave of ~5,500 early adopters to the platform. Krisp continued to bag laurels from all corners of the globe, including:
Referrers & affiliates of Krisp 👯♀️Krisp was already driving growth through word of mouth, and successful launches on PH, HN, and AppSumo when the team introduced referral and affiliate programs into the mix.
These programs served as afterburners on an already purring growth engine. Expanding the GTM wingspan 🕊Krisp brought on a Sales team early in 2020. Today, the team of ~16 SDRs and AEs are tasked with landing and expanding at SMB, Mid-market, and enterprise accounts. Robert Schoenfield serves as the EVP of Licensing and Partnerships. Vahagn Sarksyan heads acquisition marketing that covers a range of top-of-funnel activities from brand awareness, demand generation, SEO, marketing ops, and ABM to paid marketing. Asti Pili heads the growth team at Krisp that’s currently looking to bring on more growth PMs with an experience in PLG to drive a culture of experimentation and measurement that’s crucial to bottom-up adoption and ultimately monetization. With experienced growth professionals such as Elena Verna serving as advisors, Krisp’s next steps on the GTM front will be worth looking out for, especially down the road in the product roadmap. What’s next for Krisp? 🔮Sitting between system sound drivers and applications, Krisp is able to leverage valuable metadata from calls to roll out call analyses and reporting. The focus in the immediate short-run seems to be on this front: noise insights and detection of interruption and monologues. Forays into note-taking and sentiment analysis seem likely as well, while video background removal (which is in beta testing) might become a focus area down the line.
The “Grammarly for voice and video” is a multibillion dollar market, especially if the Ladders CEO is right about remote work. In a world that’s increasingly going remote, very few tools are must-haves. The list of tools that offer direct meaningful boosts to productivity is a small one. Krisp.ai coasts into that list. Some housekeeping… Is your mailbox trying to keep our content away from you! 💔 What can you do about it? Mark this email as ‘not spam’ 😱 or move it from your promotions to the primary folder 👉🏻 It’s very easy! Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it. How did you like this week’s newsletter? If you liked this post from Top of the Lyne, why not share it? |
Key phrases
Older messages
Out with the barriers to entry, the anatomy of a PQL, the CIO is the last to know, and more...
Friday, June 17, 2022
👋 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to this week's edition of the ✨Top of the Lyne✨ newsletter. Each week we publish the hottest news from the beautiful world of product-led growth! (PLG) The outcome we
Posthog - the all-in-one Product Analytics Suite
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
1-2-3 growth framework, the power of self serve and other GTM strategies powering the open source product analytics rocketship - Posthog
Figma's PMF test, website visits in 2022, a PLG nitroboost, bring back maps, and more...
Thursday, June 9, 2022
👋 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to this week's edition of the ✨Top of the Lyne✨ newsletter. Each week we publish the hottest news from the beautiful world of product-led growth! (PLG) The outcome we
The $2B Calm Rocketship 🧘♀️
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Disassembling the growth engine that powered the world's first mental health unicorn to $150M+ in ARR and 4M+ paying users
A $196M mistake 🙊, Fortune favors the distributed 💰, Avengers assemble , and more...
Thursday, June 2, 2022
👋 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to this week's edition of the ✨Top of the Lyne✨ newsletter. Each week we publish the hottest news from the beautiful world of product-led growth! (PLG) The outcome we
You Might Also Like
Economic downturns don't hit evenly
Thursday, April 25, 2024
We analyse Q1 funding data for central eastern Europe, ex-JP Morgan and UiPath execs found startup and quantum computing startups to watch. View in browser Mindset Consulting flagship logo Good morning
68 new Shopify apps for you 🌟
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
New Shopify apps hand-picked for you 🙌 Week 16 Apr 15, 2024 - Apr 22, 2024 New Shopify apps hand-picked for you 🙌 What's New at Shopify? 🌱 Default layout update for Smart Grid Changed ⸱ POS ⸱ 6
Bamboo Metrics, Lune AI, and Danger
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
One API for IP, device & user risk insights BetaList BetaList Daily Bamboo Metrics Exclusive Perk Daily emails for your team's key metrics, progress and blockers Lune AI Language Tutor in Your
A Shift in LLM Marketing : The Rise of the B2B Model
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Tomasz Tunguz Venture Capitalist If you were forwarded this newsletter, and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here. A Shift in LLM Marketing : The Rise of the B2B Model Snowflake
"so you made 1 cent per hour?"
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Read time: 1 min, 22 sec On Jan. 7 2018 I made my first internet dollar: A whopping $3.32 I couldn't even buy myself lunch. What's even crazier... is on that same day, I got my paycheck (from
Founder Weekly - Issue 633
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
View this email in your browser Founder Weekly Welcome to issue 633 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week. General The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework This framework
Starting in ecommerce while still at a 9-5? Watch this video.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Free for 24 hours , In case you haven't seen this yet, here's a special replay of one of the most inspiring sessions from the Start Your E-commerce Business Summit. The wisdom and insights of
Nicolai Klemke — Switching Lanes: Physics PhD to Indie Hacker — The Bootstrapped Founder 314
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Nicolai Klemke (@nicolaiklemke) is an Indie Hacker with a PhD in Physics. Talk about a career change!
The unspoken skill of finesse
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
What finesse looks like, why it matters, and how to develop it for yourself and your team ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
KnowledgeBase, PhotoDoc, and Copybase
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
The AI-Powered Copywriting Platform for Teams BetaList BetaList Daily KnowledgeBase Build help centers to provide customer self service PhotoDoc Effortlessly annotate, organize, and back up your parcel