Swiss AI startup Snipd announces oversubscribed pre-seed funding round
Zurich, Switzerland, 3 March 2022 — Snipd, a Zurich-based startup building an AI-powered podcast player, has raised $700,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to add further innovations to the product, grow the team and expand the user base. 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.
Snipd (pronounced snipped) won first place in HackZurich 2020 with its idea to create an innovative and easy-to-use podcast player that enables listeners to capture, discover, and share the best moments in podcast episodes. 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.
“Podcasts are one of the largest sources of knowledge globally. 3 out of 4 podcast listeners say they listen to learn something new,” says Kevin Smith, Co-founder, and CEO of Snipd. “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.
“We are still in the early days of podcasting. The market is growing, and podcast content has increased by 150% since 2018,” says Hank Vigil, Founder and Managing Partner at Acequia Capital. “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 interest. We are excited about the team’s ability to innovate in this fast-growing consumer market”.
Lukas Weder, Founding Partner of Wingman Ventures states: “The passion of the founders to build a world-class product with a clear unique value proposition for its users and their track record as a team made our decision to partner up Snipd very easy. We are going to support the team building the leading next-generation podcast player and podcast content curation application on the market.”
Contact
For more information, please contact Kevin Smith, co-founder and CEO of Snipd.
Email: kevin@snipd.com, LinkedIn
About Snipd
Snipd is an AI-powered podcast player that enables listeners to capture, discover, and share the best moments in podcast episodes. It was co-founded by Kevin Smith, Ferdinand Langnickel, and Mikel Corcuera in 2021 after winning HackZurich with their innovative idea.
About Wingman Ventures
Swiss-based Wingman Ventures AG is Switzerland’s leading pre-seed fund, backing founder teams building tech companies with the potential to become global market leaders. Wingman has a track record of supporting exceptional founders in creating breakthrough companies and has the passionate conviction that the Swiss startup ecosystem is just beginning to write its best success stories.
About Acequia Capital
Acequia Capital, founded in 2010, is focused on advising early-stage founders and teams with passion and conviction about the power of software to disrupt and create business value. They partner with entrepreneurs at the earliest stages — when founders are developing the idea and are forming the team — all the way through IPO. Their portfolio companies that have IPOed include Pinterest, Wish, and most recently the Fintech company, Remitly. The investment in Snipd marks their second in a Swiss startup.
