Spotify Acquires a Podcast Discovery Startup Podz   

Today, among hundreds of voices asking for your attention, discovering one podcast that resonates is a challenge. Spotify aims to solve this problem and bring the world’s best (and most personalized) podcast discovery experience to its 356M users.  

To reach this goal, Spotify has recently announced its acquisition of Podz. Podz is a startup that’s trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery and make the experience even better.    

The company said, “We believe that Podz’s technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate the growth of the category worldwide.”  

Since most podcasts are longer than 30 minutes, so browsing for new shows is hard. To tackle this problem, Podz is developing what they call “the first audio newsfeed.” Here, the present users with 60-second clips from various shows.   

Podz makes these small clips using its machine learning model trained on audio in consultation with audio editors for more than 100,000 hours.  

Before the acquisition, Podz had raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from Canaan Partners, M13, Charge Ventures, and Humbition.  

This acquisition is proving to be yet another sign of Spotify’s ambition to take over the podcasting market, and audio entertainment.