AI audio company AudioShake says it has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Shine Capital, with Thomson Reuters Ventures, Origin Ventures and Background Capital participating, along with existing investors Indicator Ventures and Precursor Ventures, AudioShake said in an announcement on Wednesday (October 1).

AudioShake has developed an AI-driven technology that can take any audio file and break apart its components into stems, meaning separate tracks for vocals, individual music instruments, sound effects and the like.

It can do this even when a recording has only one audio track, and can be applied to music, movie soundtracks, podcasts, recorded phone calls and other audio. It “makes all audio content editable, searchable, and programmable for the first time,” Audio Shake says.

The latest investment round follows a $2.7-million seed funding round in 2023. The company said at the time it had raised $5 million in total.

The company also says it has “grown rapidly” over the past year, signing more than 40 enterprise contracts, and it has seen 400% year-over-year revenue growth, though it did not specify a number.

It says it  now counts numerous music, entertainment, sports and tech companies as clients of its technology, including Universal Music Group, Disney Music Group, Warner Music Group, Warner Bros Discovery, BET, NFL Films, and “most” of the Mag 7 companies, though it didn’t specify which of those seven tech giants (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Meta and NVIDIA) are using its tech.

It’s likely that some of these AudioShake customers are using the technology via one of AudioShake’s partners. Those include Tuned Global, a B2B tech company that offers turnkey audio and video streaming solutions, and Synchtank, a software provider for labels and music publishers.

“We’ve seen immense potential for our technology to help machines make sense of the physical world through sound.”

Jessica Powell, AudioShake

One example of how AudioShake technology can be used comes from Disney, which partnered with AudioShake last year to be able to re-engineer its early recordings, some of which are nearly a century old and available only in single-track formats.

Within the music industry, AudioShake says BMG used its tech to remaster Nina Simone’s seven-decade-old debut album Little Girl Blue, while Reservoir Media used AudioShake tech to bring De La Soul’s catalog to streaming. (The legendary hip-hop group’s music had been kept off streaming services due to uncleared samples.)

Additionally, “sports leagues and organizations are using the technology to remove unlicensed music from clips, in order to avoid copyright fines,” AudioShake said.

“From the beginning, we’ve built AudioShake hand-in-hand with content owners – helping them unlock new creative opportunities for their work,” said Jessica Powell, the CEO of AudioShake and former Google VP who co-founded the company in 2021 with Luke Miner, former head of data science at Plaid..

“At the same time, we’ve seen immense potential for our technology to help machines make sense of the physical world through sound. This funding enables us to advance on both fronts,” Powell added.

“AudioShake is building the foundational layer that makes audio as flexible as text or images,” said Alex Hartz, General Partner at Shine Capital. “Every audio file contains multiple layers of information that were previously inaccessible. AudioShake unlocks that value.”

“Every audio file contains multiple layers of information that were previously inaccessible. AudioShake unlocks that value.”

Alex Hartz, Shine Capital

Tamara Steffens, Managing Director at Thomson Reuters Ventures, said audio represents “one of the last frontiers of unstructured data that organizations struggle to fully leverage. AudioShake’s technology transforms audio from a static asset into actionable data.”

She added the company sees “tremendous potential for this capability across industries where audio content contains critical business intelligence that was previously locked away.”Music Business Worldwide

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“I see a lot of young people now—they’re wanting to take the easy route without working so hard,” she exclusively told Fortune. “But the truth is, you have to make the sacrifices. You have to put yourself through a lot of discomfort.”

Sabry knows what it means to lean into discomfort. As the first Egyptian astronaut—and the first Arab and African woman in space—her career has been shaped by brutally early mornings, periods of total isolation, and even digital detoxes from social media to toughen her mental focus. 

Even now that she’s made it, the millennial is still pulling 13-hour days and juggling 3 jobs plus a PhD in aerospace engineering. And she has a message for the younger generation of work-life balance enthusiasts: Success doesn’t come to those who stay in their comfort zone.

“Especially Gen Z, whenever they start feeling discomfort, they stop,” she said. “We millennials know that there’s no such thing as work-life balance. My career is my life, my life is my career. I would never be at peace if I wasn’t working so hard.”

How Gen Z can get better at sitting with discomfort

Indeed, the youngest generation of workers are reshaping the world of work and forcing employers to rethink their flexible work policies because many would rather attempt being their own boss than stick with an outdated employer. But Sabry says whether or not you go down the corporate path, or the entrepreneurial route like she has, the astronaut’s core advice to those seeking to “break something,” is to rethink how discomfort is perceived.

Afterall, it’s not like she actually enjoys those 4:30 a.m. morning alarms. Instead, she describes it like a plank: The longer you hold onto the uncomfortable position, the more you’ll feel the benefits later. And Sabry even has some special astronaut training up her sleeve that helps you sit with discomfort. 

“You can make yourself excited about it,” the 32-year-old, who is also the executive director of Deep Space Initiative—a nonprofit she founded to make space more accessible—co-founder of the Egyptian Space Agency’s Ambassador program, and researcher for the NASA-funded Humanspaceflight lab, said. 

“We have so much control over our minds, it’s ridiculous that they’re not teaching us this in school. A lot of the astronaut training that I had to do was psychological; it was all about switching these moments of stress with visualizing a peaceful place.”

Before flying on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Aug. 4, 2022, Sabry trained herself to feel at ease because “when you’re on a rocket, and you have to have clarity.” And she says anyone can do it, by simply telling their brains that that feeling of sweaty palms and panic is evidence you’re growing—so instead of resisting it, lean in and use it as a signal that you’re on the verge of progress.

“So you switch the discomfort from negativity to positivity. And you know that because you’re feeling discomfort and because you’re feeling you’re getting resistance, that it means you’re actually doing something great—and if what you’re doing wasn’t big enough, then you wouldn’t get so much resistance, or you wouldn’t feel this much discomfort.”