Resound
Year founded: 2021
Headquarters: Louisville
Number of employees: Eight
Founders: Jacob Bozarth, CEO; Mark Minnery, COO
Amount of capital raised: $1.35 million
Notable investors: Render Capital, Keyhorse Capital, Lunsford, Bluegrass Angels, Commonwealth Seed
Description: Resound is a software company on a mission to automate podcast editing with artificial intelligence (AI). After manually editing thousands of podcasts at Resonate Recordings, we built an internal tool to automate the process. Now we’re perfecting that tool so we can share it with the world.
What are some major milestones in the company’s history?
July 2022 — closed a SAFE round of $1.35 million; November 2022 — Released to private beta waitlist with V2 of machine learning model that detects filler sounds and their boundaries with far greater accuracy; December 2022 — Launched public beta so anyone can create a free account for a limited time.
What is your company working on right now?
User acquisition to improve the product — customer feedback and collecting usage data. And finding product/market fit. We have a highly diverse waitlist and are working to find out who finds the most value in our solution and how we can improve.
What’s on the horizon for your company in 2023?
Integrations with major players in the space (podcast creator tools, remote recording platforms, hosting providers). Improving machine learning model to expand the feature set and use our own audio data to train new models that cab detect and remove repeated words, false starts, stutters, long pauses and filler words (“you know,” “right”) as well as other Resound editor improvements. Additionally, the next capital round is in September 2023.
Why grow your company in/from Kentucky?
Access to great people and impressive resources for the size of a city. Louisville has a small-town feel in that if you want to get an intro to someone, they are likely only one or two connections away. I feel that resources are very accessible for founders and startups.
Also, the investors (at least the ones we have) have been very helpful and encouraging. I have heard horror stories from founders about investors being a pain to work with but that has not been the case at all for us.
Give us one bold prediction in 2023 for startups, technology or venture capital/fundraising?
I believe you will see healthy startups continue to thrive amidst economic uncertainty. The economy can feel like the weather with it changing so quickly and rapidly.
But I believe the uncertainty can force you to focus on the most important things and mute out distractions and noise that can be louder in times of prosperity. I see this as a good thing and believe you will see companies hone their focus and provide more defined solutions to problems their customers face.
You will see fewer trend-chasing or fair-weather businesses pop up and more healthy businesses thriving in 2023.
Simply put, you do more with less in times of uncertainty.
