Dante Adds 555 Products as Audinate Resets Its Cost Base

At its annual general meeting on 20 October, Audinate put numbers on a platform that most AV projects now treat as infrastructure rather than a product choice. Dante was embedded in 5,158 products from 542 manufacturers at the end of June 2026, 555 of them released during the financial year, with 137 design wins recorded and 229 further manufacturers still developing their first or next Dante device. More than eight million Dante-enabled devices have shipped, and roughly 375,000 people have been trained or certified across 24 countries. Revenue for FY26 rose 15% to US$46.0 million at an 82.0% gross margin.

The profit line tells the other half of the story. Underlying EBITDA moved to a A$3.6 million loss from a small profit a year earlier, and cash and term deposits fell to A$65.1 million from A$109.9 million as the company absorbed the Iris acquisition and restructured its workforce. Operations are now grouped into Embedded Components, Installed Products, and Software and Services, each with its own leadership. Management expects broadly flat operating costs in FY27 with gross profit growth in line with the 15% pace of FY26. Shares were trading at A$2.02 on 2 November, down 59% over twelve months, which is a reminder that an installed base and a share price are different instruments.

Two details deserve attention from anyone writing a specification. First, the company flagged constraints on RAM, flash memory and semiconductor capacity tied to AI infrastructure investment, and confirmed it has passed higher memory prices on to customers while qualifying alternative parts. Networked audio endpoints carry the same memory as everything else, so quoted prices and lead times on Dante-equipped amplifiers, loudspeakers and interfaces should be treated as provisional for the next few quarters. Second, the reorganisation into three units changes who answers which question: silicon and licensing through Embedded Components, finished hardware such as AVIO adaptors through Installed Products, and Director, Virtual Soundcard and Iris through Software and Services. Integrators who used one account contact for everything will find that conversation splitting.

The strategic read for system designers is less exciting than the headline count and more useful. A protocol with 5,000-plus products has stopped being a differentiator and become a default that has to be engineered properly: stream counts and multicast groups, a single PTP clock domain, firmware branches that differ between OEMs, and a documented fallback when the switch or the controller is unavailable. Choosing Dante is now the easy part. Amtune builds Dante and AES67 audio interfaces, Dante audio modules and AES67 modular I/O for exactly that layer of the design, where the network is assumed and the engineering is not.