Black Goblin Audio Ltd
Black Goblin is an Edinburgh-based creative-tech company building workflow assistants for sound designers and post-production studios. Our tool, Thol, accelerates manual sound spotting, converting visual action into DAW-ready markers, AAF/XML templates, and Foley session blueprints. By eliminating administrative session prep, we protect creative flow and empower sound teams to focus on artistry.
Posted: 05 November 2026
Founded by sound designers in Edinburgh, Black Goblin builds workflow tools engineered specifically for audio post-production studios, supervising sound editors, and independent audio creators. The company eliminates the industry's single biggest workflow friction point: the "Mechanical Time Tax"- the non-creative, frame-by-frame video logging, project setup, and administrative tasks that devour up to 30% of every production timeline. Black Goblin’s flagship platform, Thol, acts as an intelligent co-pilot for sound design teams. Powered by multi-modal computer vision, Thol "watches" picture cuts to extract scene materiality, kinetic movement, and environmental context, instantly generating frame-accurate timecode markers, AAF/XML timeline exports, and Foley session blueprints. Rather than replacing human artistry with generic generative shortcuts, Thol integrates directly into standard Digital Audio Workstations (Pro Tools, Nuendo, Reaper), allowing designers to index their multi-terabyte private sound libraries on-device and auto-complete spotting lists using their own trusted sound assets.
Ana Betancourt, CEO & Lead
Ana Betancourt (CEO & Lead) is an award-winning sound designer with 15 years of industry experience across 50+ film and TV projects. Holding an MSc in Sound Design from the University of Edinburgh and a BEng in Music Production Engineering from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, she combines deep creative tenure with technical execution. Supported by CTO Haendel Mex (Dual MSc in Acoustics & AI), CMO Scott Robinson (ex-Apple, iZotope), and Product Manager James Clarkson, the team fuses elite domain authority with deep-tech expertise.
