EssilorLuxottica buys Pulse Audition, the Riviera start-up behind noise-filtering glasses

The eyewear giant is acquiring the young company co-founded by Manuel Pariente, which uses artificial intelligence to make a speaker's voice stand out in noisy environments.

Understanding the person next to you in a packed restaurant: that is the problem Pulse Audition set out to solve, and it is what interests EssilorLuxottica. The Franco-Italian eyewear group announced in Paris on Thursday the acquisition of the French start-up, which specialises in AI-based noise reduction and voice enhancement, Maddyness reported. The price was not disclosed.

The deal follows the acquisition of Nuance Hearing in 2023 and is part of the development of the group's hearing glasses, sold under the Nuance Audio brand: frames with built-in microphones and speakers to help people with mild to moderate hearing loss.

Pulse Audition was founded in October 2022 by Manuel Pariente, its chief executive, and Thibaud Moufle-Milot, after more than a year of research at Inria's start-up studio. Manuel Pariente, who holds a doctorate in speech processing, wrote his thesis at Inria on AI-based voice enhancement; he is also the lead author of Asteroid, an open-source audio source separation toolkit presented in 2020.

The start-up, supported by the Incubateur Provence Côte d'Azur, had raised €550,000 in pre-seed funding and employed eight people, six of them working on algorithms, according to Made in Marseille. It was part of the regional delegation at CES in Las Vegas in January 2024. Its technology now joins one of the world's leading eyewear groups.