Cisco Systems is acquiring BabbleLabs to further boost WebEx video and audio quality of service (QoS), the networking giant disclosed today.
This is M&A deal 340 that ChannelE2E has covered so far in 2020. See the full M&A deal list here.
BabbleLabs's software includes noise removal and speech enhancement technology. In addition to QoS capabilities, BabbleLabs strengthens customer privacy and cloud security by processing noise removal 100 percent at the source where the noise happens (on the client side), Cisco notes.
BabbleLabs raised $4 million in seed funding in January 2018. Cognite Ventures led the funding, with additional support from Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures, and notable independent investors John Hennessy, Harvey Jones, James Hogan and Kurt Keutzer.
In a prepared statement about the deal Cisco-BabbleLabs deal, Jeetu Patel, senior VP and GM, Cisco Security and Applications Business Unit said:
“A great meeting experience starts with great audio,. We’re thrilled to welcome BabbleLabs’ team of highly skilled engineers. Their technology is going to provide our customers with yet another important innovation – automatically removing unwanted noise - to continue enabling exceptional Webex meeting experiences.”
Added Chris Rowen, CEO and co-founder of BabbleLabs:
“BabbleLabs is excited to become part of Cisco and the Collaboration Group,. The Cisco team shares our passion about speech as the core of collaboration and communication. Cisco’s Collaboration platform will enable us to quickly scale our exceptional speech enhancement technology for the hundreds of millions of Webex users.”
Cisco expects to close the deal sometime this quarter.
