China-based podcasting platform developer CastBox has raised $12.8m in a series A round featuring SIG China, an investment fund run by technology and trading firm Susquehanna International Group.
The round, which closed in June 2017 but announced on Friday, was co-led by venture capital group IDG Capital and VC firm Qiming Venture Partners with participation from GSR Ventures and ZhenFund, according to VentureBeat.
Founded in 2016, CastBox is the creator of a podcasting app that uses natural language processing and machine learning to help users discover new shows.
The platform’s recommendation engine examines a user’s listening behaviour, including what they listen to in full, what they stop listening to quickly and what they share, in order to determine suggestions.
CastBox also recently introduced an in-audio search feature that lets users search for specific keywords within the audio content of a show, rather than the metadata associated with it.
Xiaoyu Wang, CEO of CastBox, told VentureBeat: “If you consider the next generation user interfaces, with products like Google Home or Amazon Echo and even Android Auto paving the way, it will no longer be powered by your fingers, rather it will be spoken audio powered by audio commands.
“But behind the scenes, what has empowered companies to move into the audio space has been the tremendous progress in natural language processing to understand spoken commands and machine learning to enable the most personalized recommendations to each user.”
The company has now raised $16m in total, previously collecting $1m from undisclosed angel investors in March 2016 and $3.2m in pre-series A funding from IDG November 2016.