Advancit Capital
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Podchaser raises $4M to build a comprehensive podcast database
Podchaser, a startup building what it calls “IMDB for podcasts,” recently announced that it has raised $4 million in a funding round led by Greycroft.
In other words, it’s a site where — similar to the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database — users can look up who’s appeared in which podcasts, rate and review those podcasts and add them to lists. In fact, CEO Bradley Davis told me that the startup’s “vibrant, exciting community of podcast nerds” have already created 8.5 million podcast credits in the database.
Davis said this is something he simply wanted to exist and was, in fact, convinced that it had to exist already. When he realized that it didn’t, he posted on Reddit asking whether anyone was willing to build the company with him — which is how he connected with his eventual co-founder and CTO Ben Slinger in Australia. (Podchaser is a fully distributed company, with Davis currently based in Oklahoma City.)
To be clear, Davis doesn’t think podcast nerds are the only ones taking advantage of the listings. Instead, he suggested that it’s useful for anyone looking to learn more about podcasts and discover new ones, with Podchaser’s monthly active users quintupling over the past year.
For example, he said that one of the most popular pages is politician Pete Buttigieg’s profile, where visitors don’t just learn about Buttigieg’s own podcast but see others on which he’s appeared. (You can also use Podchaser to learn more about TechCrunch’s Equity, Mixtape and Original Content podcasts, though those profiles could stand to be filled out a bit more.)
There has been endless discussion about how to fix podcast discovery, and while Davis isn’t claiming that Podchaser will solve it wholesale, he thinks it can be part of the solution — not just through its own database, but through the broader Podcast Taxonomy project that it’s organizing.
“I think if we are successful at standardizing a lot of the terminology, and if we do an analysis of all podcasts, of how popular they are, that [will help many listeners] to cull and find the good stuff,” he said.
Podchaser plans to add new features that will further encourage user contributions, like a gamification system and a discussion system.
While the consumer site is free, the startup recently launched a paid product called Podchaser Pro, which provides reach and demographic data across 1.8 million podcasts. It also monetizes by providing podcast players with access to its credits through an API.
Davis said the startup was “lucky” that it decided to build a database that’s “agnostic” from any specific podcast player.
“So we had a lot of latitude to work with those platforms, we integrate with many of those platforms and you’re going to see a lot of our credits showing up [in podcast players],” he said.
In addition to Greycroft, Advancit Capital, LightShed Ventures, Powerhouse Capital, High Alpha, Hyde Park Venture Partners and Poplar Ventures also participated in the round, as did TrendKite founder A.J. Bruno, Ad Results Media CEO Marshall Williams and Shamrock Capital Partner Mike LaSalle.
“Even in the face of a pandemic, the podcast market continues to grow at a breakneck pace,” said Greycroft co-founder and chairman Alan Patricof in a statement. “The demand from consumers and brands is insatiable. Podchaser’s data and discovery tools are crucial to taking podcasting to new heights.”
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Pragma is a back-end toolkit for gaming companies, so game developers can focus on games
These days, most of the games developed need to be social, multi-platform and extensible, but there are only a few developers with the expertise to bring those toolsets to the profusion of new games that crop up every year.
Well, now those development studios can turn to Pragma, which is building the back-end toolkit for gaming companies so their developers can focus on what they do best — making games.
It’s basically taking a page from the application development playbook where off-the-shelf toolkits can reduce by months the time it takes to get an app into the market, according to Pragma chief executive Eden Chen. In the game industry, a game can stay in beta for years as developers work out the kinks.
“In the game world, because of the necessity to build multiplayer, the length to launch a game has gotten way, way, way, way longer. Games are taking five to 10 years to launch out of beta,” Chen said.
Founded by Chen and former Riot Games engineering lead Chris Cobb, Pragma is offering a “backend as a service,” according to the company, selling a toolkit that includes accounts, player data, lobbies, matchmaking, social systems, telemetry and store fulfillment.
In a way it’s a complement to the front-end game engines from companies like Epic, the creator of Fortnite.
Indeed, Epic had announced plans to create a back-end system for game developers of its own, but Chen sees the benefits of having an independent operator doing the work — not a potential competitor.
Pragma’s investors agreed. The company raised $4.2 million in funding from a clutch of high-quality firms and individual investors, led by the Los Angeles-based Upfront Ventures with participation from Advancit Capital and angel investors Jarl Mohn, president emeritus at NPR and former Riot Games board member; Dan Dinh, founder of TSM; and William Hockey, founder of Plaid.
“In a world where gaming studios have long used third-party engines to power their front-end development, it makes no sense for the same studios to spend millions of dollars to build their own custom back-end,” said Kevin Zhang, partner at Upfront Ventures and board member at Pragma, in a statement. “This broken system has lasted for so long because creating a reusable, platform-agnostic backend is not just extremely complex but rarely prioritized compared to the game.”
The gaming industry is a $139 billion behemoth that in some ways lags behind its technologically-savvy peers in creating off-the-shelf tools to speed production. They’re combinations of social media platforms like Facebook and Snap, and big, high-budget movie productions, but lack any tools to simplify the process of development or ensure that persistence, scale and feature complexity don’t lead to downtimes. And downtimes could mean millions in expenses and lost revenues, Pragma said.
“Creating online multiplayer games is increasingly complex and expensive. Studios are hindered by the need to not just create compelling games, but also to build custom server technology to operate their game,” Chris Cobb, the company’s chief technology officer, said in a statement.
The company currently has one customer on its platform and will launch to an exclusive set of beta users in late 2020.
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Solve, the startup creating an interactive ‘Law & Order’ for social media, raises $20 million
When “Law & Order” ended its 20-year run in 2010, it had already cemented its place as one of the longest-running television dramas in history. Its success was a testament to the enduring popularity of a good mystery.
Mining that same well of a demand for whodunnits, a roughly one-year-old Los Angeles-based startup called Solve has raised $20 million in financing to update the genre for a new generation of media consumers.
Its eponymously titled social media programming, available on Instagram and Snap, has managed to nab roughly 30 million interactions over the year-and-a-half that it distributed its productions. Now the company is launching a true crime podcast on the iHeartMedia and Apple platforms to tap into another potentially high-growth market.
Solve began as a series developed within the mobile-focused entertainment studio, Vertical Networks. Helmed by Tom Wright and financed by Elisabeth Murdoch (through her Freelands Ventures fund, which Wright also managed) and Snap, the company was one of the early entrants to raise cash as a production studio for mobile content. But it was far from the only studio to see money in mobile-first entertainment. All of the major internet-age media companies had their own mobile strategies.
Murdoch eventually replaced Wright (so that he could work on spinning up Solve as an independent entity) and sold Vertical Networks two months ago to the online media startup, Whistle, for an undisclosed amount.
“I spent a year looking deep, deep, deep into audience behavioral data on Snap and Facebook,” Wright says. “The DNA of what I thought [audience] sensibilities was leading towards was this format.”
As Vertical Networks was winding down, Solve was spinning up with help from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and Advancit Capital.
“We’ve seen incredibly popular crime mystery shows across media, including podcasts like Serial and Dirty John, TV shows like Making a Murderer and Law & Order, and movies like The Usual Suspects and Gone Girl,” said Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. “Games have attained a first class status as media but we’ve yet to see a crime mystery format game achieve the same success, and Solve is going to right that wrong.”
The gamification element that’s made Solve’s episodes resonate with mobile audiences on social platforms will be a small part of the initial series, says Wright, with plans to expand the interactive elements going forward.
Produced in partnership with SALT audio, whose previous work includes “Blackout” and “Carrier” and iHeartMedia, the 10-episode series uses the same “ripped from the headlines” storytelling for its 30-minute broadcasts and offers listeners clues in leaked audio files, voicemails, courtroom testimony and other evidence to try to guess the killer.
For now, Solve is content to be a studio producing ad-supported media for platforms like Apple, Snap, Facebook, iHeartMedia and other distributors, according to Wright. It’s a different path than studios like Quibi, which is creating its own streaming service dedicated to mobile storytelling and backed by many of the major Hollywood studios.
The current pace of production means that Solve is making 18 original episodes per month. For the 40-year-old Wright, Solve represents a fourth foray into the world of startups. And while he’s not a fan of the crime or mystery genre himself, Wright said that the data around engagement was too compelling to not try to launch a business around it.
“The Internet has changed how we interact with the world from taxis to news to shopping. We believe that Solve can fundamentally change how we interact with narrative video storytelling,” said Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures, in a statement. “When we heard Tom’s vision for short-form video that you not only watch but also must ‘solve‘, we knew that it had enormous potential.”
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Launching from beta, ProGuides is making money ensuring that gamers never play alone
When ProGuides pulled the covers off of its service earlier this year, the young Los Angeles-based startup intended to give gamers a way to train with professional and semi-pro esports players from around the world.
But as users signed on to the service, it became clear that they weren’t looking for training necessarily… Instead, what players wanted was a ringer.
“After we launched the beta, we found some interesting user behavior,” says Sam Wang. “We found that gamers were experienced already and wanted experienced players who are better than [the matches] the game can provide… At the end of the day you do get to play with someone pretty awesome and is something that I think can make games better.”
That’s right, ProGuides is pitching a marketplace for experienced gamers so that its customers aren’t randomly matched with some noob if they can’t game with their usual partners.
“Our tagline is ‘Play with pros’ now,” says Wang. “We already have over 5,000 sessions that were played in the last two months.”
The professional gamers who list their services on the site charge an average of $10 per session and ProGuides takes about a 25% cut. The company lowers its rates for popular gamers or gamers who are willing to spend more time on the platform either selling their services or actually coaching esports players.
Wang says that pros on the platform are making anywhere from $750 to $2,500 per month and that there are currently 250 coaches on the platform.
A typical session on ProGuides lasts around 45 minutes and players are available for Fortnite, League of Legends, Super Smash Brothers, CS:GO and Hearthstone.
ProGuides raised $1.9 million in pre-seed funding last June. The company is backed by Amplify, an LA-based early-stage investor and company accelerator, Quest Venture Partners, Greycroft Tracker fund and the GFR Fund.
The LA-based company also has some venture-backed competition on the East Coast. Gamer Sensei, which has raised roughly $6 million (according to Crunchbase) has a similar proposition. It’s backed by Accomplice and Advancit Capital.
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