Augmented Instruments Ltd

Company description

Augmented Instruments operates a digital music studio.

Augmented Instruments Ltd is a spinout from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, incorporated on 8 September 2016. The aim of the company is to develop and commercialise digital musical instrument research developed in the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, a research team within the Centre for Digital Music led by Dr Andrew McPherson. Technology is licensed from QMUL to Augmented Instruments Ltd, which develops and sells direct to consumers and conducts business consultancy related to the technologies. The company's flagship product is Bela (http://bela.io), an open-source embedded computing platform for ultra-low-latency processing of audio and sensor data. Bela, originally known as BeagleRT, was developed starting in 2014 in the Augmented Instruments Laboratory. Since its creation for a specific musical instrument, it has gradually grown into a general-purpose platform aimed at the maker and musician communities. It couples high performance (1GHz processor, submillisecond latency, high-bandwidth, synchronous gathering of audio and sensor data) with ease of use (a browser-based development environment and support for popular computer music programming languages). On 1 April 2016, Bela completed a highly successful Kickstarter campaign which raised £54,902 (out of an original goal of £5k). This provided the seed funding to spin out the company, which has subsequently been supported by sales of Bela and industrial consultancy.

Project impact

The spinout company now handles sales and support to the general public, and has received a £30k grant from Innovate UK to further develop the Bela technology.

Augmented Instruments Ltd launched Bela for public sale in October 2016. Its annual turnover was around £200k in 2021. The company is profitable without the need for investment funding. As of early 2022, it employed two full-time staffs member and several part-time positions. Income came from sales and from several industrial consultancy projects. In the second year, the secure two grants from Innovate UK. It launched a new product, Bela Mini, in February 2018. It also continued to support a growing open-source community, providing resources including a repository of code and hardware designs, a tech support wiki, an online discussion forum, a blog featuring user-created projects, a YouTube channel and other social media links. As of early 2022, these resources continue to grow in scope and audience. We estimate that 3000+ unique users on 6 continents have acquired their own Bela boards since the project began. Bela sales to date exceed £600k. We studied the characteristics of our early adopter community in [3.1]. It contains a diversity of profiles and interests: makers (i.e. technology hobbyists and independent creators); musical performers; musical instrument and synthesiser designers; interactive artists; teachers; students; researchers in fields ranging from human-computer interaction to digital signal processing to neuroscience. As of early 2019, AIL also had around 200 institutional customers, including universities (45%), companies ranging from SMEs to large multinationals (25%), design and art consultancies (17%) and arts/maker organisations (6%). Bela is being used for teaching in 20 universities beyond QMUL including Aalborg University Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Kiel (Germany), University of Virginia (USA), Griffith University (Australia) and NTNU (Norway). Since 2016, Bela has been used in dozens of public workshops across Europe, North America and Australia, including events at maker spaces, museums, trade shows, music festivals, conferences, universities, secondary schools, and many other public venues. Many of these were led by the Bela creators (first at QMUL, then also at Augmented Instrumenst Ltd), and some are led spontaneously by our community. Total participation across all events is hard to precisely quantify, but is easily in excess of 1500 people. Bela maintains a committed and enthusiastic online community who contribute back to the project through porting software tools (e.g. computer music languages SuperCollider, Csound, FAUST, pyo) and through writing up and sharing projects built with Bela. In 2019, the company completed another successful Kickstarter campaign for Trill, a new type of capacitive touch sensor aimed at makers and artists. The campaign raised £25k and sales have continued since then. In January 2023, the company launched Gliss, a synthesiser module featuring the Trill technology, raising over $70k on the crowdfunding site Crowd Supply. As of 2023, the company continues to grow steadily based on sales of Bela and Trill products and industrial consultancy services, and the Bela community continues to expand in industry, education, research and creative practice.

Augmented Instruments Ltd launched Bela for public sale in October 2016. Its annual turnover is around £130k. The company is profitable without the need for investment funding. During the first year, it employed one full-time staff member and several part-time positions. Income came from sales and from an extended technical consultancy with a major European musical instrument manufacturer. In the second year, the company expanded with the support of grants from Innovate UK, increased sales, and additional industrial consultancy. The company hired three members of staff with support from Innovate UK. It launched a new product, Bela Mini, in February 2018. It also continues to support a growing open-source community, providing resources including a repository of code and hardware designs, a tech support wiki, an online discussion forum, a blog featuring user-created projects, a YouTube channel and other social media links. We estimate that 2500+ unique users on 6 continents have acquired their own Bela boards since the project began. Bela sales to date exceed £500k. We studied the characteristics of our early adopter community in [3.1]. It contains a diversity of profiles and interests: makers (i.e. technology hobbyists and independent creators); musical performers; musical instrument and synthesiser designers; interactive artists; teachers; students; researchers in fields ranging from human-computer interaction to digital signal processing to neuroscience. As of early 2019, AIL also had around 200 institutional customers, including universities (45%), companies ranging from SMEs to large multinationals (25%), design and art consultancies (17%) and arts/maker organisations (6%). Bela is being used for teaching in 20 universities beyond QMUL including Aalborg University Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Kiel (Germany), University of Virginia (USA), Griffith University (Australia) and NTNU (Norway). Since 2016, Bela has been used in dozens of public workshops across Europe, North America and Australia, including events at maker spaces, museums, trade shows, music festivals, conferences, universities, secondary schools, and many other public venues. Many of these were led by the Bela creators (first at QMUL, then also at Augmented Instrumenst Ltd), and some are led spontaneously by our community. Total participation across all events is hard to precisely quantify, but is easily in excess of 1500 people. Bela maintains a committed and enthusiastic online community who contribute back to the project through porting software tools (e.g. computer music languages SuperCollider, Csound, FAUST, pyo) and through writing up and sharing projects built with Bela. In 2019, the company completed another successful Kickstarter campaign for Trill, a new type of capacitive touch sensor aimed at makers and artists. The campaign raised £25k and sales have continued since then.