Stockholm, Sweden – May 2, 2022 – Elk, an award-winning developer of professional audio technologies, announced it has closed 26.25M SEK/2.66M USD in Pre-Series A funding led by LEDNIL AB and Berno Invest AB. The latest round of funding was also supported by return backers Navare Förvaltning, Augmented Ideas XL, and Almi Invest. The startup will use the infusion of capital to fund growth and geographical expansion as well as strengthen its core ultra-low-latency technologies Elk Audio OS and Elk LIVE.

With people increasingly taking notice of what we’re doing, the first batch sold before the public launch. “This round of investment will help us elevate our mission in bringing realtime remote collaboration to all musicians and making Elk Audio the defacto standard operating system for all audio devices,” states Raffaele Curci, co-founder and CEO of Elk Audio. “Elk Audio’s low latency technologies have a broad range of use cases with significant growth opportunities across both consumer and professional audio markets today and enormous potential when 5G becomes a reality in the near future. Our immediate focus will be to reinforce our exceptional team and onboard technical talent across engineering, product and project management as well as expand our sales and marketing.”

Founded in 2014, Elk Audio is the developer of Elk Audio OS, the world’s fastest operating system for real-time musical collaboration. The proprietary OS is a fine-tuned hybrid system with dual Kernel (RTOS / Linux) and custom audio driver, facilitating roundtrip latencies down to 1ms. Elk Audio OS can run over a single general-purpose CPU ranging from Broadcom/Raspberry Pi to Arm, to Intel X86 architectures. Hardware agnostic, the Elk Audio OS codebase is 100% portable and licensed to tier-one pro audio hardware manufacturers.

In 2022 Elk Audio began shipping Elk LIVE, the revolutionary remote collaboration system based on Elk Audio OS.  Elk LIVE enables musicians to play together in real-time from different locations. The system offers artists an immersive studio experience that preserves the emotion and improvisation of live music collaboration even when they are apart. Elk LIVE is used today by musicians across every genre including early adopters Foreigner (rock), San Francisco Opera (classic), 5606 (punk), and Ikiz Cabin Crew (jazz). Elk LIVE was a finalist for the prestigious SXSW 2022 Innovation Award, Music and Audio category. Elk LIVE runs on 5G, with ongoing collaboration with key telco players on optimization including Ericsson, Verizon, Vodafone, and many others.

“The tailwinds from the pandemic have made remote collaboration technologies a permanent part of our personal and professional daily lives.  Yet, the ability to have a real-time remote audio experience has been non-existent, until now, ” state Peter and Jacob Lindell representing LEDNIL AB AND Berno Invest AB. “Elk Audio’s real-time solutions are transforming the way musicians, artists, producers, educators, and can collaborate, create and deliver. This latest investment will help the company scale and deliver a world-class product that connects musicians and audio products globally, much like the way video conferencing technologies have enabled deeper connections than ever before possible.”