What was the inspiration behind founding AudioStack? What’s your mission?

What led me to work at AudioStack was a combination of my background and personal values. I started my career as a software engineer and data scientist working in open-source software, which ignited my interest in building tools that empower others. I've always been drawn to the democratisation aspect of technology – giving people the means to create and innovate on their own terms. When I met my AudioStack co-founders, it became clear that we all shared a passion for unlocking creativity through tech. Beyond that, I believe we have a moral responsibility to use technology to make lives better, and that alignment with AudioStack's mission made it a natural fit for me. We enable every brand to tell its story better throughout the world. 

As a startup founder working with artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), what were some of the biggest technical, operational, or entrepreneurial hurdles you had to overcome early on?

I think it’s fair to say that entrepreneurship always involves solving problems!

In the early days, we were highly focused on product iteration, research, and design. We were actually worried that the synthetically generated content wouldn’t resonate with humans, so we did a lot of prototypes and iterations to clarify that. 

Afterward, we had to scale our infrastructure, which AWS was helpful with (via the AWS Activate programme, and other support, such as go-to-market support (PR, events, and webinars) and Solution Architect support, which helped us build a product to get to our first inkling of product-market fit. 

AudioStack leverages AI technology in its solution. Can you provide some examples of how your customers are using your AI technology to create ads rapidly and cost-effectively?

AudioStack leverages AI technology, including Amazon Bedrock (a fully managed service from AWS that helps users build generative AI applications), to help our customers create ads rapidly and cost-effectively. One way this is done is by using AI to pull in companies' brand guidelines, ensuring that the content we generate reflects the unique voice and identity of each client. This automation significantly speeds up the creative process while maintaining consistency across campaigns, helping to scale and automate audio production.

Additionally, AI is used to incorporate compliance-related issues into the ad content, ensuring that ads meet industry standards and legal requirements without the need for manual intervention. This allows our clients to create high-quality, personalised ads more efficiently, reducing both time and cost. Our AI technology decreases production time by up to 95%, and reduces production cost by up to 80%.

Customers also use AudioStack for data-driven personalisation, using data such as location and time, to enable brands to craft dynamic, relevant ads for higher engagement.

Flexibility in production is also a big focus, as advertisers must be agile, adapting, and customising content quickly to meet changing consumer needs and platform requirements.

You participated in the AWS GenAI Loft this month in London. Can you tell us more about your involvement? 

We had the opportunity to showcase how AudioStack's solution enables retailers to create thousands of professional-quality audio ads in minutes at a lower cost, using advanced AI technology. It was a great event to bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn from AWS experts, such as Business Development for funding readiness, Solution Architects for technical consulting, and Account Managers to help us collaborate most effectively with AWS and deal with day-to-day issues.

Can you tell us more about how Amazon Web Services is supporting AudioStack on its startup journey?

AWS has been instrumental in supporting AudioStack on our startup journey in several ways. First and foremost, AWS, with its breadth and depth of services, supports scaling companies and offers specialist support to experiment with AI workloads, providing the robust infrastructure we need to grow our technology and scale. Additionally, AWS offers valuable support whenever we need it, ensuring that we can tackle challenges effectively.

Since day one, we have viewed AWS not just as a technology provider, but as a potential go-to-market partner. Becoming an AWS Partner – which involved a combination of go-to-market readiness, getting listed on the AWS Marketplace, and technical readiness by passing the Foundational Technical Review – further solidifies this relationship. This showcases our customer trust and enterprise readiness, which has enabled us to expand into new markets and acquire customers of our own. This milestone opens the door to a deeper partnership with AWS, allowing us to leverage AWS's resources and expertise as we continue to grow.

For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to leverage AI in their own initiatives, what advice would you give them based on your learnings so far?

Fundamentally, a lot of the opportunity we’re seeing in AI is in the application layer. It feels like the foundation model layer is a well-defined market with a small number of providers who are converging toward feature parity.
Therefore, like with any startup, focus on your users and learn from them. I think this leads to some of the success we’re seeing in the Gen AI space of solving workflows end-to-end. This is what we’re doing with optimizing audio production at AudioStack – we spend a lot of time iterating and working with customers to learn how to solve their business problems.

Looking ahead, what’s next on the horizon for AudioStack’s product roadmap and growth plans as you continue building out your AI-powered foundation?

We’re expanding globally at the moment, with our main focus being the US. This is a very exciting market for us, and we’re already seeing significant traction.

What’s coming next for us includes a more streamlined offering for enterprises, better creative production tools aimed at agencies, and improvements to our audio engine, including better choice of sounds and heavy investments in user experience.

Ultimately, we’re very excited about building AI-first tools for the creative industries and unlocking more use cases.