Flat Speakers at the Core of South Bend Startup
A group of recent graduates from the University of Notre Dame is looking to disrupt the sound industry. South Bend-based Resonado’s patented flat core speaker technology was originally developed in South Korea by Chief Executive Officer Brian Cho and his father, an electrical engineer. Cho co-founded Resonado with three classmates while they were undergraduates at Notre Dame.
In an interview on Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick, Cho said the company’s products essentially use the same technology as traditional speakers, put together in a different way.
“I use a bakery example; we have this recipe that we created using the same exact material, but in a different way,” said Cho. “So we’re rethinking the core mechanism behind how the sound is produced by re-arranging the internal components that constitute a speaker design. By doing that, we can make speakers into much more compact, but maintain a good quality.”
Since its launch, Resonado has raised more than $1 million in early venture capital funding from around the country. The company is also now the official sound partner of Notre Dame athletics.
Cho says he sees a real potential for growth for the company. “We’re essentially a B2B company. We work very closely with multinational corporations and just like you would see with consumer electronics…we want to be the company inside every sound product that enables innovative design.”
Resonado is located at Innovation Park, an 80,000-square-foot entrepreneurship center which is part of the IDEA Center at Notre Dame. Cho says while the perception is that innovation in the speaker industry only happens on the coasts, it can really happen anywhere, including the Midwest.
“There’s huge talent here; there’s a lot of resources here that people do not seem to recognize that. We want to be at the forefront of bringing this innovation back to the Midwest and be the force of change here.”
The IDEA Center will next month host its annual IDEA Week, which celebrates innovation, entrepreneurs and the incubation of new ideas. Cho says Resonado will have a major announcement during the event.