Our Story
The Common Denominator
Microphones and speakers are everywhere, always. Phones, laptops, headphones, smart speakers, TVs, watches, VR/AR headsets, cars, and more. Just as the ubiquity of cameras has changed everything from security to social media, so too will audio.
Audio signals can be interpreted, mixed, transformed, and combined with other technologies in new ways to impact our lives as much as our ears and voices, and then some. We have the team and tech to do anything with audio.
How we got started
A few significant steps in our journey over the years.
2016
Synervoz enters Techstars with an app that lets you talk (VoIP) while listening to music. A voice detector ducks the music when someone speaks.
2017
Synervoz raises $1.5M from top investors like Lowercase and Slack to build Switchboard, an audio app for spontaneous communication including drop-in, voice commands, music, and more. “Audio-Slack”
2018
Switchboard comes out of beta as one of the top products on Product Hunt and starts to grow. But there’s a problem, we don’t have Android yet, and we haven’t yet solved noise and echo suppression.
2019
Realizing we’re early with our social audio vision, Synervoz pivots from B2C (an app) to B2B (an SDK + custom engineering). From here, Synervoz starts to grow from cash flow, rather than venture capital.
2020-22
The pandemic hits, new behaviors take root including social audio, watch parties, and more. Meanwhile, we help productionize machine learning models for audio, making new use cases feasible.
Present
Today we sell software and services to customers with advanced audio and VoIP needs. We also have internal projects and R&D that we continue to advance; testing and iterating on new products and ideas.
In building out the Switchboard app, we touched a lot of audio technologies including webRTC, ML models for voice detection, speech to text and text to speech, noise and echo suppression, low level audio programming, and more. We also learned a lot about the limitations of high level audio frameworks like those available on iOS and Android. That led us to develop the Switchboard SDK.
Check out our Venture Studios page to see some of the cool features we built for Switchboard, and to better understand some of what we could help you build lightning fast.
Our team values and supports one another.
We’ve had some memorable moments along our journey and always make the most of it when we can meet together in person, whether its for events or a night out on the town.
“Audio will underpin the future of social. Synervoz will underpin the future of audio.”
Jim Rand
CEO
Voice communication and music are in our DNA and have been the primary focus in our company evolution.
Go to Switchboard to learn more about our internal projects and platform.
Leadership
Jim Rand
CEO
Dual undergrad from Queen’s. MBA grad top 1% (IE, Spain). Professional engineering, management, and finance background w/ 15 yrs across many industries. Formed Synervoz in 2014. Patents issued and pending. Graduated Techstars, Creative Destruction Lab, 48 Hrs in Valley, Berkeley Skydeck. Won Candian Music Week pitch contest, finalist at SXSW. Well-traveled (60+ countries).
James Meier
CTO
U of T computer science, mathematics, and music tech background. Former reverse engineer for Telus with experience in security and communications. Proficient across multiple platforms and programming languages. Audio and real time systems. Music production studio owner. World’s first cyborg DJ (built and performed with embedded system). With Synervoz since 2015.
Balazs Kiss
VP Engineering
MSc. Advanced Software Engineering at Kings College, London. iOS expert level developer with in depth knowledge of object oriented (Swift, Obj C, C++, Java), scripting (PHP, JS, AS, Python), declarative (Prolog, Erlang) and procedural (C, Pascal) languages. Extensive experience with audio, VoIP, & webRTC. Multilingual (English, Hungarian, Italian). With Synervoz since 2016.