Ingenious Audio secures £310,000 investment

Ingenious Audio chief executive John Crawford with Jack. Picture: Contributed

THE developer of a wireless guitar audio gadget has secured a £310,000 investment in an oversubscribed fundraising as it looks to ramp up production.

Ingenious Audio, based in Edinburgh, received the funding through Glasgow-based Kelvin Capital and the Scottish Co-investment Fund from the Scottish Investment Bank, the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise.

The latest cash injection, which follows on from a crowdfunding campaign, will support development of the firm’s audio streaming system “Fi-Live” and Wi-Fi guitar cable “Jack”.

The company claims that Fi-Live offers “better than Bluetooth” audio, providing higher quality, longer range and much faster transmission for use with PCs, tablets and phones, making it suitable for live music applications like the guitar or microphone.

The “Jack” product plugs into any guitar or amplifier and transforms it into a wi-fi device for wireless playback and studio quality connection to PCs, tablets or smartphones. Ingenious Audio’s chief executive John Crawford, a former manager at Wolfson Microelectronics who runs the business with four colleagues, said its innovations had received “massive interest” from customers around the world,

“This funding allows us to widen our reach to both ramp up production and explore the range of other applications and customers for this technology.”

Kerry Sharp, head of the Scottish Investment Bank, said: “Our investment complements the Scottish Enterprise support given to help the company innovate, explore overseas markets, and connect with our global professional network.

“Ingenious Audio is a great example of a young, dynamic Scottish start-up with global ambition and our follow-on investment will help John and his team to continue to grow the company apace.”

Ingenious Audio has been working intensively with Glasgow University for the past four years to develop the device.

John McNicol of Kelvin Capital, which was already an investor in the company before the latest funding round, said that the recent worldwide interest enjoyed by the business “demonstrated its attractiveness to many global technology companies”.

Kelvin Capital was founded in 2009 and invests venture capital in start-ups and young businesses which have the potential to deliver significant growth and return to investors.

The guitar electronics market is worth £2 billion in the US alone, with about 1.5 million guitars sold annually.