Imagine you are a Formula One driver rushing through the racetrack at 200 mph as an engineer goes on the radio and says. You can’t make it, but you’re also not going to play rap on that old Verizon commercial (“Would you listen to me now?”) in a race, and in your life.
This is just one of the issues Norwegian Startup Hance is solving with impressive, small and fast audio processing software that has already attracted customers such as F1’s official radio suppliers, Intel and Riedel Communications. Hans is one of the 200 startups selected to showcase their technology at TechCrunch Strupt 2025 from October 27th to 29th at the Moscon Center in San Francisco.
The costumes of approximately 10 employees boast extensive audio industry experience. These include co-founder Stian Aagedal, who is also CEO of audio editing software company Acon Digital, and Peder Jørgensen, who runs the Sound Effects Library firmly.
With artificial intelligence booming, Aagedal, Jorgensen and other Hans teams have noticed opportunities to leverage these new technologies across their audio processing pipelines, particularly in noise reduction and separation. So, a few years ago, they began training their own models with high quality Soundly recordings, from the roaring of F1 cars to cracks and corruption in volcanoes in Iceland.
Since then, they have been able to reduce the Hans treatment model to just 242 kb. This means you can save time and energy by running it on the device rather than on the cloud. Hans says these models can separate sounds, remove noise, echo and reverb, and enhance the clarity of the voice with just 10 milliseconds of latency.
Other companies offer similar audio processing software, but Hance’s small, energy-efficient models can process audio in real time on devices of any size. This is great for the radio that Riedel sells to F1 or FIFA, and is appealing to law enforcement and defense applications, CEO Joote Hika told TechCrunch in an interview.
Hika sees an opportunity to move in more directions now that Hans’ audio processing lines up Intel as a partner. Hans has worked with the technology giant to employ the model to work with different versions of the chip, including the latest “neural processing units.” The startup is talking to other ship makers, Hika said, and the private smartphone maker.
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Hika said these professional partnerships are likely to last at least several years, and they are non-exclusive. That’s good for the startup’s scaling ability, but he said Hans needs to continue developing at a rapid pace to stay ahead of the competition. The company has invited its first Chief Commercial Officer, but Hika said it hopes Hans will focus on R&D and that the company prefers to continue to exclude “AI-enabled” workers.
“We know that there are advantages over our competitors now, but we definitely need to keep it up, so we’re pushing fast,” he said.
If you’d like to learn more about Hance and dozens of other startups, listening to pitches and listening to guest speakers on four different stages, it will take place in San Francisco from October 27th to 29th.
Click here for more information on tickets and prices.
