When we started Sounder, our goal was to build amazing tools to add real value to the evolving podcasting ecosystem. Over the past 20 months, we’ve spent time with podcasters and the audio community to do just that. As Sounder, we’ve heavily invested in research and development to help creators of all sizes with true technology solutions that they can’t get anywhere else. A few weeks ago, we launched the result, Sounder Plus.
Today, we're excited to announce another exciting development. Podnods, a podcasting discovery and analytics company, is joining the team at Sounder.fm! Podnods and Sounder share a common belief in making audio more discoverable and better for everyone while supporting a thriving and innovative ecosystem. We're excited to bring our companies together and build the next generation of audio technology focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Audio has been deprived of true technological innovation for quite some time, and we hope to do our part to elevate the medium with other like-minded partners.
There are over 2 million podcasts made by passionate creators around the globe covering almost every topic under the sun. Most of these shows haven’t reached the full potential audience they deserve, simply because listeners haven’t found them yet. We want to change that. With Podnods and Sounder joining forces, we are leveraging our AI expertise to build a podcast monetization and discovery platform that helps creators reach more listeners with personalized audio content.
While Sounder has been focused on serving the creator community, and Podnods has been focused on serving the listeners, we’ve both seen the challenges within podcasting as a two-sided problem; creators and listeners. To bring these two communities closer together, we knew we needed to invest even further in discovery tools while also doubling down our focus on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. We’re happy to share that by joining forces we’re accelerating our efforts to address these needs for both creators and consumers.
And how will we do it? We’ve already indexed and analyzed most of the world's podcasts, generating our initial audio graph with over 3 billion data signals to drive discovery, engagement and personalization for creators and listeners alike. Combining our proprietary automated speech recognition technology with our natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, we believe we have a winning formula to help solve many problems in the audio industry.
Our companies are also both based in NYC, the epicenter for media, podcasting and advertising. We're committed to building a research & development hub in NYC and look forward to adding to our growing and talented team of Soundernauts around the world. If you’re interested in joining our team, we’d love to hear from you!
Stay tuned as we’ll have more to share in the coming weeks.
Kal Amin
Kal Amin is Sounder’s Co-founder and CEO. He has spent 20+ years in the media and technology space and has held executive roles at some of the leading global technology platforms. Prior to Sounder, Kal previously served as the VP of Global Business Operations at Spotify, GM of Sponsored Listings at AOL, Director of Global Market Development at Google, and most recently as the COO of content curation platform Flipboard.
