Voicy, an online content platform for discovering, creating and sharing sound-clips and sound-effects, has secured a €1.2 million pre-Seed round led by Oliver Samwer’s Global Founders Capital.

Senior executives from a host of leading tech companies including Twitch, Spotify, Deezer, Snapchat, Booking, Uber, Reddit, Acast and Tesla also contributed to the round. The funding will be used to grow Voicy’s team, develop its partnership network and expand its presence across Europe and the US.

Voicy has two sides to its business. The first enables users to create or use a library of short audio messages or sound effects, which can then be downloaded, shared or messaged. The second is an instant integration with consumer apps and social platforms which enable users to search and send sound clips and audio GIFs as part of their existing chat function. Voicy’s mission is to do for sound clips what GIPHY has done for GIFs.

In just over a year, Voicy  has built a community of 1.1 million regular users who have created a database of 125,000 unique sounds totalling an average of 35 million monthly plays. On top of that, 10,000 new sounds are added each month. Voicy has also recently signed a partnership with Viber with users having sent over 20 million audio messages,  which have been played together 100 million times in only three months.

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Among the investors in Voicy are Jeronimo Folgueira (CEO, Deezer), Sven Ahrens (director of global growth, Spotify), Oskar Serrander (COO, Acast), David Vismans (former CPO, Booking), Sunita Kaur (senior VP at Twitch, former director at Facebook), Mike Sackler (Founder and partner, VC Supernode Global) and serial investor Wouter Kneepkens.

Xander Kanon, Co-Founder and CEO of Voicy, said: “There is a communication shift happening in which shorter formats of content have become more important and popular than ever before. First you had emojis, then you had GIFs and now you have ‘Voicies’.

We believe that audio memes will become the next big thing in social media and will play especially a vital role in the future of communication within streaming and gaming applications. When sharing our vision with investors, we always got the same question: Why doesn’t this exist yet? Voicy enables users to express themselves in a completely new way. With Voicy’s short entertaining sounds, communication becomes more direct, fun and expressive. In essence, the excitement for our community and users is that they can create iconic sound bites which can then become part of the language millions of people from across the world use to communicate with.

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This funding round will enable us to take the next step on our journey, which is building up our team, improving our product offering and securing partnerships with some of the world’s leading apps and communication platforms.

Our partnership with Viber showcases how quickly and easily major platforms can integrate with Voicy using a simple universal API.”

Soheil Mirpour from Global Founders Capital, said: “Voicy is a very exciting new startup. In short order, their strong team has grown a huge community of very active users who are creating hundreds of pieces of new audio content every day. There’s a massive amount of potential for short audio in social communication. A Discord user spends on average 285 minutes a day in a Discord voice chat, people share 7 billion voice messages per day on Whatsapp alone and billions of people use short audio in their Tiktok or Instagram videos. Voicy brings a new concept to the table, which is ready to disrupt an enormous market – we knew we had to invest.”

Sven Ahrens, Director of Global Growth at Spotify, said: “Voicy combines the most interesting trends in user-generated audio content for messaging and gaming – what is there not to love? Every messaging, media and gaming platform is trying to get audio interactions right, and with Voicy they have the perfect tool right in front of them. Fueled by a fervent community of soundboard creators, people from all over the world can now send quick reactions and emotions as sounds. No matter what app they’re in.”