# FreunDo Company Content

FreunDo is a UK-based edge AI hardware company in Edinburgh. The company develops low-latency, low-power FPGA-accelerated edge AI platforms for intelligent sensing systems, with an initial focus on next-generation hearing aids and assistive listening devices.

## Mission

FreunDo helps compact devices process sensor and audio data locally, instantly, and securely without relying on cloud processing or high-power general-purpose processors.

## Product Direction

FreunDo's first product direction is a low-latency FPGA-accelerated AI platform for speech enhancement in hearing aids and assistive listening devices. The platform combines:

- A lightweight speech enhancement model
- A streaming FPGA accelerator architecture
- Adaptive AI-DSP post-processing logic

## RFD Speech Enhancement

RFD is a lightweight speech denoising and enhancement model. Given noisy speech, it outputs cleaned speech in real time. It is suitable for calls, recording, hearing-assistance scenarios, and low-power on-device audio systems.

RFD uses three core techniques:

- RepConv reparameterisation: expressive training structure, lean deployment structure
- Causal attention: low-latency streaming inference without future look-ahead
- Frequency-heterogeneous output head: separate handling of low and high frequency bands

## Evaluation

RFD was evaluated on the VCTK-DEMAND test set with 824 utterances at 16 kHz.

| Metric | Score | Meaning |
| --- | ---: | --- |
| PESQ | 2.30 | Perceptual speech quality, higher is better |
| STOI | 0.925 | Short-time objective intelligibility, higher is better |
| SI-SNR | 15.17 dB | Scale-invariant signal-to-noise ratio, higher is better |

## Efficiency

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Compute | 28.3 MMAC/s |
| Parameters | 29k training, 23.7k deployed |
| Latency | Causal streaming, no look-ahead |
| Audio format | 16 kHz sample rate, 16 ms hop |

The small compute footprint and compact model size are designed for real-time deployment on low-power on-device chips with minimal heat and battery impact.

## Target Partners

FreunDo works with hearing technology companies, OEMs, ODM suppliers, semiconductor teams, audio SoC teams, assistive technology companies, research partners, and intelligent sensing businesses.