Sounder Raises $2.15M in Follow-on Seed Round to Bring Podcast Management and Monetization to Creators

Sounder , the industry’s first end-to-end podcast management and monetization platform built with and for creators, today announced the completion of a $2.15M follow-on round for a total of approximately $4M of seed financing raised in the past 14 months.

The $2.15M raise was led by Ulu Ventures, and joined by new and existing investors including Newark Venture Partners and Xoogler.co, a community of Google alumni and current Google employee investors, and individual Spotify and Google executive angel investors.

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“This new round of funding will allow us to advance our proprietary search, speech-to-text, contextualization, and NLP technologies, solving existing problems creators face while also innovating within the overall audio landscape.”

“2020 was a very successful year for Sounder across product development, partnerships, and monetization, said Kal Amin, Co-founder and CEO of Sounder. “This new round of funding will allow us to continue to solve problems creators face while innovating within the overall audio landscape. It will also allow us to bring our premium product, Sounder Plus, to market.”

The company will use the proceeds to continue its mission of powering an open and thriving audio ecosystem that supports independent creators, enterprise-level publishers and developers. With this funding, the company plans to further advance its proprietary search, speech-to-text and contextualization technologies as well as establish a new R&D center of excellence in New York.

“Sounder continues to demonstrate its value proposition for media channels and podcasters, enhancing discovery and monetization across the ecosystem,” said Miriam Rivera, Co-founder and Manager Director of Ulu Ventures. “Sounder’s technology will allow audio content to be searched and discovered in a streamlined and intuitive manner, which will help expand the total market as well as enable accelerated growth.”

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Sounder’s new monetization solutions have already yielded meaningful impact for creators, with some partners seeing an average of 35% increase in streams, an 80% average increase in bid requests for programmatic campaigns, and ad rates more than 25% above industry average, quarter to date.

“Sounder is developing the next frontier of a booming audio market by streamlining monetization and expanding discovery for podcasters. As the audio space continues to experience massive growth, Sounder’s platform will serve the needs of both content creators and audiences hungry for new material,” said Allison Williams, Principal at Newark Venture Partners. “We are proud of Sounder’s journey thus far, and we look forward to what the future holds for Kal, Dan and their team.”