The podcast industry shows no sign of slowing, with emarketer forecasting ad revenue to more than double and grow to $2.7 billion by 2025. The pandemic has lent a hand in accelerating growth in podcast listening and accounted for the steep number of podcasts launched during this time.
With almost 60 million podcast episodes available and growing by the day, leveraging AI to drive and personalise content for its users is here to stay.
Zurich-based startup building an AI-powered podcast player, Snipd has raised $700,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Swiss venture capital firm Wingman Ventures, with participation from early-stage US VC Acequia Capital, and Contovista co-founder Gian Reto à Porta.
The additional investment will help the startup to add further innovations to the product, grow the team and expand its user base.
Founded in 2021 by Kevin Smith, Ferdinand Langnickel, and Mikel Corcuera after winning HackZurich with the idea, Snipd is creating an easy-to-use podcast player that enables listeners to capture, discover, and share the best moments in podcast episodes. With the Pinterest-like discovery features, listeners receive personalised recommendations for other podcasts in the form of short highlights called ‘snips’, allowing them to quickly navigate through the vast amount of content available and find relevant new information.
The platform’s users can also create their own ‘snips’ to capture and save noteworthy podcast moments to their collection, together with an AI-generated transcript, summary and title.
Kevin Smith, co-founder and CEO, Snipd said: “Podcasts are one of the largest sources of knowledge globally. 3 out of 4 podcast listeners say they listen to learn something new. At the same time, AI is fundamentally changing how we interact with spoken audio.”
“We are still in the early days of podcasting. The market is growing, and podcast content has increased by 150% since 2018,” said Hank Vigil, founder and managing partner, Acequia Capital.
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