Podcastlea podcasting platform that enhanced its product with various AI-based features, has raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Mosaic Ventures.
Existing Podcastle investors RTP Global, Point Nine Capital, Sierra Ventures and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund also participated. Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena and Moonbug Media CEO René Rechtman also participated in the round.
The platform now claims to have around one million creators using its tools, many of which feature AI-based features, although this number has not been independently verified.
In a statement, Simon Levene, co-founder and partner at Mosaic Ventures commented: “Arto and the team at Podcastle have built a flagship product and are already showing signs of organic growth that we believe will only accelerate in the coming years.”
In a conversation with Arto Yeritsyan, founder and CEO of Podcastle, he told me: “Last summer we launched podcasts for groups. So we’re moving from a single-user experience to a multiplayer experience. So this funding aims to scale that up. We saw this scale with 10x growth last year. So basically, we’re going to scale it up.
Podcastle offers Revoice, a creative AI voice cloning tool. Magic Dust AI, to improve sound quality. the Podcastle Hosting Hub and Podcastle for Teams.
He said the platform focuses on creating long-form, audio and video content: “Basically anything that produces content that doesn’t look like short-form Tiktok-type content. We help teams collaborate and it covers the entire workflow from ideation to actually broadcasting to the audience, meaning you can record on our platform, you can then edit or invite someone to edit.”
He also believes the platform differentiates itself from competitors by offering real-time collaboration and artificial intelligence features.
“We are fighting with Riverside on the recording side and Description on the processing side. Descript is desktop based and you need to install on your computer, while we are web based and cover the entire stream. So our offering is to be a one-stop shop with real-time collaboration on the web. As a comparison, we would be like Sketch versus Figma. Sketch needed to be installed on your computer, not web-based or cloud-based where you could collaborate, and Figma basically emerged as a collaboration product. So we’re pretty similar, but for creating video and audio content.”
He plans to make a virtue of both these collaborative features and electronic processing: “In our case, you have the entire workflow within the same product. Podcasters can invite editors and the team can do the edits, and then they can invite the marketer to create items like short-form video or long-form video and share them on social networks, right from the same platform without go.”
I also asked him what the biggest trends in podcasting are right now.
“The biggest trend is what we call studio sound. Our tools can create a “pseudo-quality audio” from any input. So you can record something on your phone and the output you get is almost as if you were in a studio, even if you’re podcasting with three people, each of them having a different environment, different distance from the mic, different noise levels .”
He says these tools were built because video podcasting is becoming very popular on YouTube, where it’s promoted, so Podcastle introduced video tools to meet that demand: “No matter what camera you’re using, you can create DSLR camera quality. You can add AI blur or bokeh effects.”
Another big trend is marketing, he says: “We met it with the ability to create a lot of shorts and distribute them across all social platforms. AI gives you the opportunity to do this automatically, rather than manually, by creating all the elements you need to share across different platforms to engage users in your long-term content.”
He says consumers and businesses are starting to make their decisions not by scrolling through websites but by watching their content: “They go to their YouTube channels, podcasts and listen to that and then make a decision, as opposed to the old ways of you do that.”
I also asked him if he thinks Armenia is becoming more of a tech hub, given that unicorn companies like Picsart have emerged from there. Podcastle’s engineering team operates out of Armenia, which is fast becoming a new European tech hub, bolstered by the establishment of offices by big companies like Adobe and Nvidia in search of programming talent, especially in artificial intelligence.
“Yeah sure. We’re basically becoming a little Silicon Valley here. You’ll see companies like Adobe building offices. The CEO of Adobe was here last year. We have Nvidia here and people from companies like Picsart are starting their own companies. I was VP Engineering at Picsart for about eight years,” he says.
The company also recently hired Allan Rechtman, former vice president of Canva, as Chief Commercial Officer. Damian Saccoas VP of Development (ex-Prezi); and Dmitry Kopylovsky was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer.
