Berlin, Germany’s Brandenburg Gate. Photo Credit: Ansgar Scheffold
Digital hearing-test company Mimi Hearing Technologies has announced the completion of a $25 million Series B funding round.
Berlin-headquartered Mimi Hearing Technologies, which says that it “aims to give users the best possible listening experience by tailoring audio signals across any electronic audio devices” based upon “individual hearing ability,” publicly detailed the $25 million raise in a formal release today.
German VC MIG Capital led the round “in a consortium with a larger Munich-based family office and Salvia, the family office of Helmut Jeggle,” Mimi disclosed, along with support from different “German family offices and existing shareholders.”
Mimi’s release notes that the seven-year-old company is continuing to license its technology to B2B customers such as “electronic device manufacturers, streaming providers and hearing aid companies.” However, the entity intends to use today’s capital influx “to significantly expand its product offerings in existing device categories such as headphones and TV displays,” besides moving “into additional signal processing and audio platforms, including smartphones.”
Lastly, in terms of how Mimi Hearing plans to utilize the $25 million tranche, higher-ups said that they will broaden “sales and marketing operations in China and the United States, which together are home to many of the leading consumer electronics manufacturers and content providers.”
In a statement, Mimi CFO Moritz Bratzke said of his company’s Series B: “The leading investors of our Series B garnered international attention last year as the founding investors in BioNTech, the NASDAQ listed German biotech company that, together with Pfizer, developed the first Covid-19 vaccine and is now valued at approximately $70 billion.
“Their investment in Mimi is another testament not only to the depth and breadth of the German venture capital climate, but also to the importance and tremendous commercial potential of Mimi’s vision,” finished the former Atlantic Labs venture associate Bratzke.
It’ll be worth following the adoption rate and market performance of Mimi Hearing Technologies in the coming months and years, with an emphasis on the latter.
Of course, more individuals than ever are using headphones to enjoy music and other audio entertainment, and a 2019 United Nations study bluntly declared that over “one billion 12 to 35-year-olds risk irreversible hearing loss from exposure to loud sounds such as music played on their smartphone.”
North of 900 million individuals “will have significantly impaired hearing” by 2050, the report also claimed, but a different analysis determined that occasional concerts and music festivals pose relatively little risk to younger attendees’ hearing.
Worth mentioning in conclusion is that Sennheiser over the summer sold its headphones business to Swiss medical-audio manufacturer Sonova.