SIG leads $13.5m round for US, China-based Castbox
SIG China has led a $13.5 million Series B funding round for Castbox, a US and China-based podcasting platform with content in multiple languages.
Existing investors IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and GSR Ventures also participated. It brings the company's total funding to date to $29.5 million.
The new capital will be used to accelerate user adoption, expand proprietary technology, and invest in original non-music audio streaming content across a variety of genres. It will also help diversify distribution across mobile, auto, and smart home channels.
"Podcasting is still in its early stages, but it's growing at an incredible pace," Renee Wang, founder and CEO of Castbox, said in a statement. "We have innovative features that our users love, but it's not enough to keep up with the growing market demand."
Castbox was set up in China in 2015 and has since moved headquarters to the US. It offers country-specific content services tailored to markets across Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America, and the United Arab Emirates. The company claims to have doubled its user base to 15 million people since October 2017 and grown its podcast library to some 50 million episodes.
Services include personalized programming suggestions based on listener behavior as well as artificial intelligence-supported search applications that transcribe and index audio content such that users can browse specific topics within the stream itself. Two original content series have been produced to date with assistance from podcast studios and are available via Apple Podcast and Spotify.
The company has attracted comparisons to Qiming-backed short video streaming platform Musical.ly, which is also a China-founded company that has developed a strong global audience, including US and European users. Musical.ly was acquired last year by China's Toutiao in a deal said to be worth up to $1 billion.
Podcasting is considered a nascent category with scant global data. However, Statista estimates that in the US alone, podcast advertising spending will increase from $207 million in 2017 to $395 million by 2020.
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