Shazam

Answering a universal question — "what song is this?" — with a tap

Audio-fingerprinting technology that felt like magic drove enormous organic adoption, making it one of the world's most-downloaded apps.

We backed a team that had solved a problem widely considered impossible: Avery Wang's Stanford PhD in audio signal processing produced an algorithm that could identify a song from seconds of noisy audio in a bar, paired with commercially driven co-founders in Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, and Dhiraj Mukherjee.

Their conviction predated the smartphone itself — launching as a dial-in service years before the App Store existed — and that persistence was rewarded when mobile finally caught up with the idea, crystallising in Apple's ~$400M acquisition in 2018.