Imagine you are a Formula One driver hurtling down a race track at 200 miles per hour. Your engineer comes on the radio with a critical message, but you cannot make it out. There is no time to ask for a repeat with the race, and your life, on the line. This is one of the problems the Norwegian startup Hance is solving with a remarkably small and fast piece of audio processing software. The technology has already attracted customers like Intel and Riedel Communications, the official radio supplier to Formula One.
Hance is one of the 200 startups chosen to showcase its technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. The event runs from October 27 through October 29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The company of around ten employees possesses significant audio industry experience. This includes co-founder Stian Aagedal, who is also the CEO of audio editing software company Acon Digital, and Peder Jørgensen, who runs the sound effects library Soundly.
With the artificial intelligence boom, the Hance team saw an opportunity to leverage these new technologies throughout the audio processing pipeline, with a particular focus on noise reduction and isolation. A few years ago, they began training their own models using Soundly’s high-quality recordings. These recordings included everything from the roar of Formula One cars to the crack and rumble of Icelandic volcanoes.
Since then, they have successfully shrunk the Hance processing models to a mere 242 kB. This small size allows the software to run directly on a device instead of in the cloud, which saves both time and energy. Hance states these models can separate sounds, remove noise, echo, and reverb, and enhance speech clarity with a latency of just 10 milliseconds.
While other companies offer similar audio processing software, Hance’s tiny, energy-efficient models can process audio on devices of all sizes in real-time. This capability makes the technology ideal for the radios Riedel sells to Formula One or FIFA, and it is also attractive for law enforcement and defense applications, according to CEO Joote Hika.
Hika sees further opportunity for Hance’s audio processing now that it has lined up Intel as a partner. Hance has been working with the technology giant to adapt its models to work on different versions of Intel’s chips, including its latest neural processing units. The startup is also in discussions with other chipmakers and an undisclosed smartphone manufacturer.
Hika said these professional partnerships will likely last at least a few years and are non-exclusive. This is good for the startup’s ability to scale, but he noted that Hance must continue developing at a rapid pace to stay ahead of the competition. The company has just hired its first chief commercial officer, but Hika expects Hance will remain heavily focused on research and development. He added that the company will prefer to hire AI-capable workers to maintain a lean operation. He stated that they know they currently have an advantage over competitors, but they must maintain it by pushing forward quickly.