EDGE Sound Research to Scale Perception Infrastructure for Physical AI

Strategic investment by Stormbreaker Ventures brings total funding to $9 million as the company
expands its proprietary sensor data from live sports into physical AI, robotics and intelligent systems

RIVERSIDE, Calif., Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- EDGE Sound Research, the company building perception infrastructure for AI to understand the physical world, today announced an additional $2 million in funding led by Stormbreaker Ventures, bringing total funding to $9 million. The new capital will fund continued deployments with live sports broadcasters, leagues and venues, expansion of its proprietary multimodal sensor data, and development of new applications for physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments.

As AI moves into robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments, its ability to understand and act in the real world depends on not just what a camera sees, but on what else is happening around it. Real-world environments are noisy and sound provides valuable context, including activity outside a camera's view.

EDGE Sound is building perception infrastructure that isolates useful sounds and combines them with other sensor data to help systems interpret what is happening in real time. Its platform captures signals from microphones and sensor arrays already installed in a space, isolates individual sources and events out of overlapping noise, and fuses them with video, tracking, timing and location data. The output is a structured, real-time picture of a scene: what happened, where, when and to which object. In sports, for example, those outputs can allow a broadcaster to automatically follow an individual player's audio throughout a game. And rather than replacing the cameras, trackers and sensors an operator already owns, EDGE Sound connects them into a single interpretation layer.

Live sports gave EDGE an immediate commercial market while allowing the company to develop and validate its perception technology in some of the most complex, noisy real-world environments. Its Virtual Sound Engine is already deployed commercially across live sports, with customers and partners including Shure, the NBA, Fox Sports, the United States Tennis Association and others.

"Today's robots and intelligent systems are like toddlers. They can reason at a high-level, but they don't consider their full surroundings before making a decision," said Valtteri Salomaki, co-founder and CEO of EDGE Sound Research. "Toddlers grow by combining what they hear, see and feel, then learning from what happens next. Machines don't have that loop yet. We started with sound because it's the signal most systems throw away, and solving it forced us to connect every other sensor in the room. A broadcaster following one player through a game and a robot knowing something happened behind it are the same problem."

EDGE Sound's approach grew out of doctoral research at the University of California, Riverside, where co-founders Valtteri Salomaki and Dr. Ethan Castro approached sound from two different perspectives. Castro, who was born hard of hearing and became a professional musician and composer, studied how people perceive their surroundings through hearing and physical vibration. Salomaki, whose background includes information systems, marketing and emerging technologies, viewed sound as a source of data. Together, those perspectives became the foundation for EDGE's approach to perception.

"Every conversation about physical AI runs into the same wall. The models and the robots are ready, but the underlying systems cannot reliably tell what is happening in real time," said Said Mia, Founder and Managing Partner at Stormbreaker Ventures. "EDGE is building that perception layer, and building it with paying customers in one of the most acoustically hostile environments there is. The team spent years on how humans actually understand their surroundings, and they are turning that into the infrastructure physical AI desperately needs."

To learn more about EDGE Sound Research, visit www.edgesoundresearch.com.

About EDGE Sound Research

EDGE Sound Research builds perception infrastructure that helps computers understand the physical world by combining sound with video, tracking, timing, location and other sensor data. Its platform isolates individual sounds and events from noisy real-world settings and connects them with the broader context of an environment. Founded in 2020 out of research at the University of California, Riverside, EDGE works with leagues, broadcasters, venues and technology partners including the NBA, Fox Sports, the United States Tennis Association and Shure, and is extending its software to broader applications in physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments. For more information, visit www.edgesoundresearch.com.

About Stormbreaker Ventures

Stormbreaker Ventures is an early-stage venture firm investing in the connectivity infrastructure powering AI, including Open RAN and AI-RAN, private 5G, satellite-cellular convergence, edge compute, IoT, connected mobility, and U.S. manufacturing modernization. Led by veteran operators and founders like Glenn Lurie, former President and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Operations; Wade Oosterman, founder of Clearnet Communications; Derek Aberle, former President of Qualcomm; and Andy Funk, a three-time founder who built and sold Virtela and OverWatchID, Stormbreaker brings decades of experience building and scaling category-defining companies across telecommunications, mobility and enterprise technology. For more information, visit www.stormbreaker.vc.

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SOURCE EDGE Sound Research