Friday, 2 February 2024, Bengaluru, India
Podcastle, a podcasting platform, has raised $13.5 million in a Series A fundraising round headed by Mosaic Ventures. The company has enhanced its offering with numerous generative AI-driven growth.
(Image Source: Google.com)
Current Podcastle investors Point Nine Capital, Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, RTP Global, and Sierra Ventures also participated. René Rechtman, CEO of Moonbug Media, and Anthony Casalena, CEO of Squarespace, also participated in the round.
The site now states that one million creators use its tools, many of which are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), though this number has yet to be independently confirmed.
“Arto and the team at Podcastle have built a leading product and are already showing signs of organic growth that we believe will only accelerate in the years ahead,” said Simon Levene, co-founder and partner of Mosaic Ventures, in a statement.
“Last summer, we released podcasts for teams,” said Arto Yeritsyan, the founder and CEO of Podcastle, in a conversation. Thus, we are switching from a single-user to a multiplayer experience. The goal of this investment is to scale that. This scale had a ten-fold increase the previous year. In other words, we’ll be climbing it.
Podcastle provides the Podcastle Hosting Hub, Podcastle for Teams, Magic Dust AI to enhance audio quality, and Revoice, a generative AI voice cloning tool.
The term “studio sound” refers to the most significant trend. From any input, our tools can produce “pseudo-quality audio.” Thus, even when you record content on your phone with three people, each of them in a different setting with varying distances from the microphone and noise levels, the result is nearly identical to what you would get in a studio.
He claims these tools were created in response to the growing popularity of video podcasting on YouTube, where it is being promoted. To meet this demand, Podcastle launched video tools: “You can produce DSLR camera quality with any type of camera.” A bokeh effect or AI blur can be added.
He adds, “We met this with the ability to create a lot of shorts and distribute those to all the social platforms.” Marketing is another major trend. AI generates all the materials you need to share across platforms to draw users to your long-form content so that you can do that automatically rather than by hand.
He claims that instead of browsing around websites to make decisions, customers and businesses are beginning to watch the material on those platforms: “They’re going to their YouTube channels, podcasts, and listening to that and then making a decision, as opposed to the old ways of doing that.”
I also asked him if, considering that unicorn businesses like Picsart have come out of Armenia, he thought the country was becoming more of a tech hotspot. The technical team at Podcastle is based in Armenia, quickly becoming a new powerhouse for technology in Europe. This development has been aided by opening offices of major corporations like Adobe and Nvidia, which are looking to hire skilled programmers, particularly in artificial intelligence.
“Yes, without a doubt. This place is turning into a mini-Silicon Valley. Businesses such as Adobe will be erecting offices. Last year, the CEO of Adobe was present. Here, Nvidia is present, and individuals from firms such as Picsart are launching their ventures. I spent almost eight years as Picsart’s vice president of engineering,” he explains.
Along with these new hires, the firm also announced the promotion of Dmitry Kopylovsky to Chief Marketing Officer, the hiring of Allan Rechtman, a former vice president of Canva, as Chief Commercial Officer, and Damian Sacco as VP of Growth (previously Prezi).
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
