Sound Particles' EIC Accelerator 3D Audio Software, Seven Years On

Sound Particles treats sound the way animation software treats pixels: each of thousands of virtual particles in a 3D scene is a sound source, and a virtual microphone records the result. The Leiria company, founded by Nuno Fonseca, a lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, was already selling the software to film sound teams when the European Commission picked it in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator. The EU contributed €1,246,098.88 to a €1,780,141.25 project that ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 October 2021, according to CORDIS. Lisbon's Instituto Superior Técnico, where Fonseca studied, rounded the grant to €1.2 million, 70% of the project cost.

Seven years on, the company is active and still independent. It sells a catalogue of spatial audio plug-ins and synthesisers, and its software has been credited on films from Dune to Oppenheimer. In June 2026 it secured new money from Portugal Ventures, the state venture capital arm, for a personalised headphone audio product. The proposal's headline promises, 107 staff and €100.67 million of accumulated net profit within five years of the project's end, are nowhere near the public record.

Where Sound Particles Stands Now

The company is trading. Its filed accounts for 2023, 2024 and 2025 are listed as available by the credit bureau eInforma, with its latest balance sheet update on 10 July 2026, and the register summary at Racius records capital increases in September 2024 and March 2026. No insolvency proceedings were found. The figures in those accounts sit behind paywalls and could not be checked for this article. Fonseca has said the company grows by about 70% a year but has declined to give its turnover, according to Forbes Portugal in March 2023, which counted 30 full-time staff, offices in Leiria, Los Angeles and London, 40% of sales in California and 1% in Portugal.

On 30 June 2026 Portugal Ventures approved an investment from its "Região de Leiria Crescimento" fund, financed by Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan, according to an investment sheet published by the company. The sources disagree on the amount: the sheet gives €500,000, while ECO reported on 2 July 2026 that Portugal Ventures had invested €1 million in Sound Particles under the same call. Whether the difference reflects two tranches, or a co-investment, is not stated in either source.

The newest direction is defence. In February 2026 Fonseca said the company had several pilots under way applying its sound and artificial intelligence work to problems such as drone detection, where radar struggles with small objects and cameras with darkness, according to Portugal Global, the Portuguese trade agency, which reprinted the ECO interview. He also said an investment round was expected to close "in the coming weeks". No customer, pilot partner or round of that kind has been named publicly since; the Portugal Ventures money announced in July is earmarked for headphone audio, not defence.

The Technology: Computer Graphics for Sound

Conventional digital audio workstations, such as Pro Tools or Logic, place each sound on a track and pan it between speakers, which works for stereo and surround but becomes slow when a scene needs hundreds of moving sources in a 3D format such as Dolby Atmos. Sound Particles borrows the particle systems that visual effects artists use for smoke, crowds or debris. A sound designer can scatter thousands of particles over an area, assign them sound files, move them and render what a virtual microphone hears, in formats from stereo to Ambisonics and binaural. The company's own CORDIS report claims complex sounds are made "up to 24 times faster"; that figure has not been independently tested.

The software found its first market on studio films. Productions credited with using it include Dune, Frozen 2 and Star Wars, according to both the CORDIS project report and a 2025 Lusa report that also lists Oppenheimer, A Minecraft Movie, Stranger Things and House of the Dragon. When Dune won the Oscar for Best Sound in March 2022, the European Innovation Council noted that the software had been used for the film's ship and vehicle sounds. Film credits show adoption by sound editors, not how much the studios spend: the per-seat licences are sold from $149.

Since the grant, the company has moved toward music producers, a larger market. It launched SkyDust 3D, a synthesiser that places each voice in 3D space, in April 2023 (reviewed by Sound on Sound), and its website now sells GrainDust, MiniDust, a family of panning plug-ins and a phone app that pans sound by pointing the handset. More than half of revenue came from these mass-market products by early 2023, Fonseca told Forbes Portugal.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The Commission's list of 3 April 2019 winners names the beneficiary as "Sound Particles Lda", the company's legal form at the time, and lists no partner company for the project. Técnico reported that it was one of six Portuguese companies among 83 selected in the round. The grant agreement was signed on 5 August 2019, and the project closed on its scheduled end date of 31 October 2021, according to CORDIS.

The final periodic report lists four strands of work. The core software gained an audio editor, a mixing view, MIDI tracks, support for third-party VST and AU plug-ins, control surfaces and GPU rendering, turning it toward a full 3D digital audio workstation. A cloud sound marketplace was built on Amazon Web Services. An audio engine for the Unreal and Unity game engines and a live link to a running game were developed. A software development kit was created for third-party extensions. The report also says two patents were submitted, but names no application numbers, and none could be found in this research.

1. Full 3D audio workstationPartly deliveredMIDI, VST3 and plug-in support ship in Sound Particles 3, which entered public beta in July 2025 and was still a beta in October 2025 and on the company's site in 2026.
2. Sound marketplace in the cloudPartly deliveredExplorer SFX Cloud sells access to over 100,000 sound effects for $19.99 a month; an open marketplace for third-party sellers is not visible.
3. Unreal and Unity integrationNot verifiedReported as built on CORDIS; no game engine product is sold or announced.
4. SDK for third-party developersNot verifiedReported as built; no public SDK found.
5. 107 staff within five yearsNot achievedAbout 30 staff in 2023 and 2025.
6. €100.67M accumulated net profitNot achievedTurnover undisclosed; a 30-person software firm shows no sign of profits on that scale.

On the engineering, the project did what it set out to do, on schedule, and much of it reached paying customers. The commercial forecast was another matter. The proposal promised a return on investment of 42 and a payback of two years; neither can be checked against public accounts, but the staff count alone shows the company is a fraction of the size its plan described.

What Sound Particles Has Achieved Since the Award

Private money followed the grant. In May 2022 the company raised €2.5 million in a round co-led by Indico Capital and Iberis with Fundo 200M, to open a Los Angeles office and develop headphone audio, a sound marketplace and gaming and music products, according to tech.eu and ECO News. That came on top of a €400,000 seed round in January 2019 led by Indico with REDAngels, reported by tech.eu. In June 2024 the European Investment Fund, which backs Indico's fund, named Sound Particles one of 30 portfolio companies it highlighted for its 30th anniversary, according to Portugal Global. The company does not appear as an EIC Fund holding; its 2019 award was a grant only.

The team tripled. Fonseca told the music business newsletter Composium that he had 10 people in 2018, a number matching the "current 10 people" in the CORDIS proposal. Forbes Portugal counted 30 in 2023 and Lusa about 30 in 2025, which suggests the headcount has been flat since 2023.

Why Europe Should Care

The Commission's Media and Audiovisual Action Plan of December 2020 set out to help the sector adopt virtual and augmented reality and new storytelling tools. Sound Particles is a European supplier whose software is used by the American studios that dominate the market, with most of its sales in the United States. The defence pilots, if they lead to products, would take a European audio company into security work, but no contract has been disclosed.

The Verdict

Sound Particles has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.