Shazam

Shazam was founded in London in 1999 — nearly a decade before the iPhone — with an idea that seemed like science fiction: identify any song playing nearby by simply holding up a phone. Founders Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee built the audio fingerprinting system when most phones were still feature phones, launching the service via SMS to the number 2580. The real inflection point came with the App Store. Shazam became one of the first breakout global app successes, accumulating hundreds of millions of downloads worldwide. The technology — based on a spectral fingerprinting algorithm patented by Avery Wang — remains one of the most sophisticated audio recognition systems ever built. In 2018, Apple acquired Shazam for approximately $400 million, integrating the service into Siri and the broader iOS ecosystem. At the time of acquisition, Shazam was valued at over $1 billion, backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins and DN Capital. Shazam is a case study in technological longevity: a product built before smartphones that managed to reinvent itself alongside them, maintaining a defensible market position through proprietary technology that competitors could not easily replicate.