Castbox is a podcast app that leverages natural language processing and machine learning to provide personalized recommendations and an in-audio search that transcribes and indexes audio. Its platform helps users discover podcasts by searching episode transcripts rather than relying solely on titles or show notes. The app has been installed 15 million times, sees 1.8 million daily users, and reports a 50% retention rate; U.S. users average 113 minutes per day while Chinese users average 12 subscriptions each. Castbox is expanding into original programming with its “Castbox Originals” slate (examples include “Off Track with Hinch and Rossi” and “Heard Well Now”) and will monetize those shows with advertising. The company is investing new capital into original programming, strategic creator partnerships, and improvements to usability, content discovery, and personalization. Castbox relocated its headquarters to San Francisco while maintaining an engineering office in Beijing and employs 52 full-time employees. CastBox is a podcast player for iOS and Android that combines a recommendation engine with an NLP-based in-audio search feature, allowing keyword and topic searches across over 50 million episodes. The search currently supports English and the company says it will perfect the feature before expanding to other languages. CastBox reports its player has been downloaded more than eight million times and that most users are English speakers. The startup plans to begin co-producing and releasing original content this quarter and intends to offer a premium tier as part of its monetization strategy. Founder and CEO Xiaoyu Wang started CastBox in early 2016 and the company is headquartered in Beijing with offices in Hong Kong and San Francisco. CastBox will use its recent funding for marketing, producing original content, and hiring engineers.

Total raised

$26M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Apr 2018