Founded in 2021 by Kevin Smith, Ferdinand Langnickel, and Mikel Corcuera, Snipd has just raised €631k in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round.
The round is led by Swiss venture capital firm Wingman Ventures, with participation from leading early-stage US venture capital, Acequia Capital, and Contovista co-founder Gian Reto à Porta.
The Zurich-based startup is building an AI-powered podcast player that enables listeners to capture, discover, and share the best moments in podcast episodes. Snipd was launched after taking first place in HackZurich 2020. It distinguishes itself from other podcast players by focusing on the needs of listeners who turn to podcasts for inspiration and to learn something new.
With the Pinterest-like discovery features, listeners receive personalized 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. Snipd 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 of Snipd, explained: “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 leverage AI technology to create the best-personalized podcast listening experience allowing listeners to discover relevant content, and save and organize memorable podcast moments.”
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. There are now almost 60 million podcast episodes available and growing by the day.
Hank Vigil, Founder and Managing Partner at Acequia Capital, added: “We are still in the early days of podcasting. The market is growing, and podcast content has increased by 150% since 2018. What excited us about Snipd is how it is applying machine learning innovations to spoken audio which enables Snipd users to have an easy way to discover and collect the best content relevant to their interests. We are excited about the team’s ability to innovate in this fast-growing consumer market”.
The fresh funding boost will be used by the young company to fuel product development, team expansion, and establishing product-market fit. The company is already seeing strong week on week growth, so this funding will certainly boost ambitions to become a market leader.
