Swell offers a personalized audio news service on iOS that streams curated podcasts and news from sources like iTunes, NPR, ABC, BBC, TED and ESPN. The app lets users skip content, bookmark items, and learns from listening behavior to make recommendations. Its recommendation engine combines external ratings, listening duration, topic matches, community judgments and signals from similar users to personalize content. Swell provides free, unlimited streaming and reports that returning users listen over 100 minutes per week and more than 40 minutes per day on average. The company was founded in 2012 with the mission of becoming the world’s most relevant and easy-to-use audio news service and targets large commuter listening hours. CEO G.D. “Ram” Rumkumar, a Stanford CS PhD, previously founded Snaptell, which Amazon acquired in 2009. The company is based in San Francisco.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Jul 2013