I met with a ton of startups during CES this year, and over the course of the next week or two, I’ll spotlight several of my favorites here on Startup50. First up is the startup Voxeet.
Early one evening, weary from nonstop meetings and the chaos of the show floor, I sat down with Voxeet CEO Stephane Giraudie at Yardbird, an excellent new bourbon bar and southern food joint in the Venetian (just outside of the Sands conference area). Over a couple of nice, stiff bourbons, we discussed his startup, its challenges and opportunities, and the overall state of this market sector.
Here’s Voxeet in the spotlight:
Startup: Voxeet Conferencing 
What they do: Provide a 3DHD mobile conferencing solution.
Headquarters: Sausalito, CA
CEO: Stephane Giraudie. Prior to Voxeet, Stephane was founder and Chief Product Officer of Papilia, a web-based communication, fundraising and social-networking software company that he sold in 2007. Stephane also worked in the area of digital photography through at Live Picture (later MGI Software), where his team built and brought to market dozens of enterprise and consumer software products for such companies as Kodak, Fuji, and Warner Bros
Founded: 2012
Funding: The company has raised approximately $2 million in seed funding from Partech International, Kima Ventures, AQUITI (ACI/Aquitaine Region and AQUI Invest), and a few angel funders.
Problem they tackle: As the modern workplace becomes more global, mobile, and digital in nature, the need for high-quality user-friendly communication tools has increased exponentially. Today, more business is conducted via audio conferences than ever before, with an estimated 200 billion minutes spent on traditional audio-only teleconferences.
Yet, as any knowledge worker who regularly has to rely on teleconferencing services can tell you, problems continue to plague these services, limiting audio conferencing efficacy, as the core technology for audio conferencing has not kept pace with usage.
Problems with the status quo include: poor sound quality, which is often muffled or choppy; the difficulty of distinguishing between participants; over-talk cancellation when two or more people talk at the same time; the inability to switch back and forth between devices during the session; and the complexity of registration and scheduling.
Click to Tweet: Startup Voxeet brings 3DHD sound (and simplicity) to mobile audio conferencing, via Startup50, http://wp.me/p330ZZ-3a
What I like about them: Voxeet intends to solve the above problems through the use of immersive 3DHD sound, which caters to the way the brain works when it’s interacting with multiple people, making conference calls feel as natural as being in the same room. Voxeet assigns callers to individual audio streams, allowing you to hear each caller’s voice coming from a distinctive place.
Their proprietary technology, along with WebRTC as its core, incorporates advanced noise processing and spatial audio rendering, all wrapped around wideband audio codecs. Layered on top of that is a straightforward onscreen UI that makes scheduling and attending meetings much simpler. When it’s time for your conference call, the Voxeet service calls you (and everyone else attending).
Voxeet also allows you to start a call on one device, such as your tablet and, without disrupting the flow of the conversation, switch to another device, let’s say your smartphone, without having to dial back into the conference and reenter pin codes.
The Voxeet mobile app is available for Apple and Android, and a desktop version is available for both PCs and Macs. The service is free to use, though Voxeet will eventually charge for premium features.
Competitive Landscape: This is a crowded space, involving everyone from WebEx to GoToMeeting to FreeConferenceCall.com to a variety of mobile apps.
Startup Voxeet believes that its focus on call quality and ease of use, as well as its ability to mimic the sound of a live, in-person meeting, will deliver enough of a competitive edge to drive momentum with knowledge workers.
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