Audioburst Closes $10 Million in Funding Including Investments from Dentsu and Hyundai, Announces Launch in Japan
Audioburst announced this morning that it had closed a new $10 million funding round that included strategic investments from Dentsu and Hyundai in addition to existing investors. The new investment brings Audioburst’s total funding to $25 million according to the announcement and reflects the third large investment over the past 13 months. In March 2018, Samsung Ventures committed $4.6 million followed in August by $3.1 million from Nippon Broadcasting system according to Crunchbase. Advanced Media made an earlier investment in June 2017 of $6.7 million. Audioburst also announced today that it will launch in Japan with Japanese language support in 2019.
Making Audio Content Searchable and Accessible
The company transcribes, analyzes and indexes radio content in real-time along with other audio content such as podcast that were previously published. The end result is audio content that is searchable. Voicebot’s Ava Mutchler wrote about the company in 2107, “[Audioburst] aims to do for audio what Google has done for web pages – make it easier to find the audio content that you are looking for. It does this by using natural language processing to understand the meaning behind audio content and index it accordingly, making it more easily accessible to search engines.”
When a user asks about a particular topic, the solution will identify recent audio content from radio or podcasts that address the subject. It then delivers a short audio clip, ranging from a few seconds to a couple of minutes, enabling the user to listen to the relevant content from one or more sources. These “bursts” can be accessed individually or in a series.
Hyundai and Denstu Strategic Partnerships
Denstu and Hyundai each contributed $5 million in funding and also have committed to partnerships to help Audioburst expand its business in automotive and with Japanese advertisers.
“For Hyundai, the $5M investment also includes plans to accelerate the development and deployment of the next generation infotainment system with Audioburst’s personalized audio search, playlists and Deep Analysis API.”
Audioburst in January 2019 announced a partnership with LGE for an infotainment system integration which will make the company’s content searchable and accessible as a topic-driven news feed to consumers while driving. Audioburst says, “Dentsu will work closely with Audioburst to build a new market for personalized audio as an effective advertising channel for brands in Japan.” The personalized audio product enables users to create playlists of news topics they want to follow and listen to the aggregated content anytime. You can think of it as a personalized news feed for audio which provides opportunities for audio insertion ad monetization.
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