It has been two years since we brought you a story about one of the most forward-thinking tech startups we’ve ever seen. We are talking, of course, about Mixhalo – a corporation built on the need for improving live sound and changing the world for many concertgoers throughout the world. Founded by Incubus guitarist and composer Mike Einziger, Mixhalo – like many startups – had humble beginnings and has since skyrocketed into a truly structured company that has gone beyond just having promise. They’re doing it…and there is so much more to come.

To bring readers up to speed, Mixhalo is an incredibly convenient – very accessible – method of enjoying sound with incredible clarity and consistency. Most of us have everything we need to achieve the consumer end of this: an iPhone and a set of headphones. If you happen to be at an event that has Mixhalo enabled, prepare for the best sonic experience of your life! Simply download the app (available for iOS, with Android accessibility coming soon), connect to the Mixhalo WiFi network at the venue, pop on your headphones, and you’re set! Enjoy the show!

For the first couple of years, Incubus field-tested Mixhalo during their tour supporting their latest album 8. Many artists since have begun to latch onto and embrace the technology that creates a brand new experience for their audiences. Metallica, Aerosmith, and Charlie Puth have all recently given their fans the Mixhalo treatment. TechCrunch also took part in Mixhalo during their annual Disrupt conference. As word spreads amongst the public, there will be more demand and Mixhalo will be more commonplace in the near future. It is truly an exciting and versatile technology with so many possibilities.

One Foot In Front Of The Other…

Mixhalo as a company has grown, as well. Recently appointed CEO, Marc Ruxin, a forward-thinking and incredibly astute businessman, is driving more opportunities for a wider breadth of use cases for the company and its consumers. He is already proving to be an incredible asset to the success of Mixhalo.

The company today has also announced a Series A financing to the tune of $10.7 million, led by Foundry Group. Ryan McIntyre, managing director of Foundry Group, will join Ruxin and Einziger on the Mixhalo Board of Directors. Foundry Group and the Series A participants joined seed investors Marc Geiger, Drew Houston, Metallica, Pharrell Williams, Hans Zimmer and Rick Rubin.

Introducing: Marc Ruxin, CEO Of Mixhalo

We had the chance to speak to both Marc Ruxin and Mike Einziger to follow up with our previous coverage and to get insight into what the future holds for Mixhalo and the consumers of this amazing technology. 

PopWrapped: Hello Marc! It’s great to meet with you today. Congratulations on your role as CEO of Mixhalo. I’ve been keeping up with highlights since speaking with Michael Einziger a couple of years ago. What made you want to pursue Mixhalo as a venture and something that you wanted to be involved in? 

Marc Ruxin: I was first introduced to the idea about 18 months ago through Marc Geiger, who runs music at William Morris. He was an investor in my last company and we’re good friends. He said, “Hey, I want you to check out this company. We’re looking for a CEO. I just put in my biggest angel investment ever. This thing is going to change the world.” I said to myself, “Well, Marc’s into it. I’ll check it out.” My reaction was that it sounded awesome, but really hard, too. He called me six months later and said, “Hey, just sit down with Mike [Einziger]. I think you’d really hit it off and if you spend enough time thinking about this, you’ll really fall in love with the vision.” So, I sat down with Mike and he told me the origin story about how, 20 years prior, he began wearing in-ear monitors. They were mostly to preserve his hearing, but also so he could play better and hear the clean mix. He said that he was hanging out with a bunch of tech guys, the CEO of Dropbox, and he said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could give what I hear to my fans in the cheap seats, or anybody at a concert?” And they said, “Yeah, totally!” 

PW: I absolutely love hearing how things get started in companies. Just a bunch of guys talking and one pipes up and says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if…?” And the rest is history, right? 

MR: Yes. They effectively wrote him a check on the spot, to which I’m sure Mike had a moment of fear and thought, “Oh, now I have to do this thing!” Mike has the Midas touch a lot of the time, though. So, he took the money in and got super lucky and found this wunderkind engineer from Cisco Meraki, probably the last really progressive networking company the world will ever see. In any event, Mike pitched the idea to this guy. He liked the idea, but there were some things that needed to be fixed or figured out. One was that we couldn’t rely on venue WiFi or cellphone connectivity because it’s largely terrible. Two, we needed to be able to control the latency. Super-hard math problems more than anything else. So, they built this platform that was mostly optimized for music, but when I sat down with Mike and he told me the story, I started to think about the business. I’m a tech guy. I am a music fanatic and have seen a tremendous amount of live music. What was more intriguing was that this was technology for live events, not just music. It doesn’t matter if it’s music, or sports, a conference, or Broadway, or translation services. For any environment where the audio experience is not great, we want to be able to distribute audio without using the Internet and without using a wearable device that you’d have to check in and out. This is the solution that can scale. 

PW: Sounds like he was the right guy for the job. Apart from music, how do you see Mixhalo being used in your mind’s eye?

MR: So, if you imagine you’re at a college football game and want to listen to the play-by-play, there’s no way the stadium can pass out 100,000 radio kits. For me, it was the breadth of the vision. Imagine a world where, in theory, you don’t need PA systems. It’s a really big idea. That’s where the lightbulb went off for me, the fact that really we make hardcore networking software, but the use case is really intimate. Anytime there is a live audio scenario, there is a solution that doesn’t require an amazing sound system because you can plug right into the clean audio, using your own phone and your own headphones if Mixhalo is enabled. 

PW: Yes! Everything is already within reach. It’s very powerful from whether near or far from the stage or center of the action, and whether you have good hearing or are hearing impaired.

MR: Another use case I like is lots of people, even if you’re close up to the stage, wear ear plugs because the sound is too loud. My reaction is if you’re going to have ear plugs, you might as well have a clean sound source AND a volume button! You might as well be able to turn good sound down rather than muffle out bad sound. It’s really a volume button at its most practical level. I think some of the most ancillary cases are best derived by our partners who are trying to solve these very specific problems. 

PW: Right, it’s very cool that we live in an age where all of these things are possible. It’s fascinating to me to see how far Mixhalo has come in such short time. With music, depending on what the artist wants, is there the option to listen to different isolated mixes during a live performance?

MR: We can do one of two things. We can take the board mix and effectively replicate the PA mix, pass it through our servers and push it down directly to the fans’ devices. With bands like Metallica and Aerosmith, with whom we worked in Vegas, they can have up to 100 different mixes if their engineer wants to do that. So, with Metallica, you can listen to James, Kirk, Lars, or Rob. In theory, the front of house mixer can create any headphone mix they want. It requires maybe 20 minutes of additional work to create the mixes to create an incredible experience for their fans and they want to make their team put that out there, they can do that. Otherwise, it’s very easy for us, with almost no input from the band or the mixer. You can make it as choice-filled as you want, or super simple. 

PW: So, if we’re talking about democratizing sound, let’s talk about the win-win for everyone involved – from Mixhalo, to the participating artists and venue, right down to the consumer. Ticket prices aren’t exactly cheap these days. Most of what are considered the “good seats” close to the stage or within the inner sections of amphitheaters can really break the bank. This leaves the outskirts like lawn areas that aren’t really designed to generate a great audio experience for ticket holders. This is really where Mixhalo would really thrive, correct? In the “nosebleeds” so to speak?

MR: Yes, absolutely. And we want – given how expensive ticket prices are these days – our longterm goal is to make sure that, for the most part, Mixhalo is free to consumers. So, our customers are either venues, festivals, bands, et cetera. Whether cost is underwritten through sponsorship or through theoretical eCommerce that happens through the app, or if it’s included as a perk for VIP tickets – we don’t want this to be a directly incremental cost to consumers. We want it to be absorbed and remonetized through the venue operator. And for the venue operator, they look at this as a way to defray costs, as well. Instead of having to upgrade audio and speaker components every year, they can push the good sound to consumers through their own devices, and they’ll save a lot of money in the long term. If there are great fan experiences, even from the bad seats, in theory they’ll be selling more tickets. We think it is a very virtuous cycle. And the point about democratizing sound, even the cheap seats aren’t cheap anymore. To the extent that you can get the best sound from the worst seat in the house, I think we’ve done what we want to do, which is to make sure people still have incentive to go and be a part of live experiences. We believe that connection during a time of screen addition is super important. We don’t want people to spend money to have a lousy audio experience.

PW: Where do you see Mixhalo in the future say, maybe five years down the road?

MR: I think it’s going to take a couple of years for Mixhalo to be ubiquitous enough across enough venues where it’ll be directly obvious to people to make sure to bring headphones with them, even though we believe something like 50% of people usually have headphones on them all the time. Music will kind of be a slow roll. Our goal is to do venue deals, starting with some of the biggest venues in the country over the next couple of years. The biggest thing for me is the opportunity we have with sports, as well. When you go to a sporting event, 50% of the sports experience that you have on TV is lost, right?

PW: Yes! Exactly!

MR: So, on TV you’re listening to the play-by-play and watch the sports and the action. At a live event, there is no PA system other than the goofy music and weird interstitial audio that they run. I grew up with a father who used to bring a transistor radio to baseball games, so I don’t even think that it’s weird. I think having the ability for fans to stream the home or away broadcasts, language translations, hear pre and postgame proprietary interviews from the stadium, all of that stuff represents an opportunity. Even big sports like professional tennis provide packs where you can listen to the play-by-play during matches. I was at a UFC match doing demos and even hearing the context around the fighters helped. It’s a brutal sport, but once you have the human interest component layered in there, you really can actually engage in the brutality. [laughs] I think for every sports instance, there will be some disproportionate percentage of people there that will tune in for some of the stuff. Say a player gets hurt on the floor, you have no context whatsoever, but that’s the type of thing where we will see people using Mixhalo to tune in to get the realtime news. We don’t require any data or WiFi or cell connectivity, it is a really additive experience for people. Event operators will be able to monetize the attention and offset the costs so that it remains free for consumers. I’m really looking forward to seeing this grow in the sports environment. 

PW: Do you have any closing thoughts?

MR: We make networking software for live events. We do conferences where people can listen to two different panels at the same time, or listening to a panel while outside of the hall doing work. We like the idea of bringing this to Broadway, where you might have a lot of dialog and every seat might not be great, or it’s hard to hear AND you have to be quiet. It’s a great use case, there. Translations. If you think about all of the movies you’ve seen with people at the UN having 100 languages translated through these wired headphone packs. We make really simple technology that has a really sexy front end. Our goal is to figure out how to scale across as many of these categories as we can over the next several years. Our roots are definitely in music and when you think about the uses at a music festival, with different stages. Or you have a GA wristband and you’re a quarter mile away from the main stage at Coachella, the sound is dismal, stage bleed. We’re excited to see the creativity of event operators. My goal in the next five years is to see people really dialed into the audio at these events in a way that they haven’t been before. I’m very excited and there have been great investors in this round. The engineering team is the best team for this business. Scaling this business starting with a handful of really large partners will make it very easy for us to tip over leagues and venue groups. I couldn’t be more excited.

PW: We are very excited, too! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, Marc.

MR: Thank you!

Join us for Part Two of our Double Feature with Mixhalo, as we sit down with founder and Chief Creative Officer, Mike Einziger to discuss his journey and the upcoming tour with his band Incubus.