Podimo, the Copenhagen-founded subscription service for short form audio stories and podcasts, has raised an additional €11.2 million in funding.
The round is led by Chr. Augustinus investment fund, and comes just 8 months after announcing its €6 million Series A. Existing investors, and the Spanish VC Aldea Opportunity Fund also participated.
Founded in 2019, Podimo is a podcast and short-form audio platform which offers personalized recommendations to listeners, while offering creators a share of revenue via premium subscriptions.
Premium members gain access to over 600 shows that are exclusive to Podimo and membership fees are shared directly with the podcast creators they listen to each month. The service is currently live in Germany, Denmark and carious Spanish speaking markets.
Co-founded by Morten Strunge, who has a track record in subscription media products via audio books service Mofibo (which he sold to Storytel), more broadly, Podimo is hoping to capitalise on the rise in consumption in podcasts. The startup’s other founders are Nikolaj Koppel, Andreas Sachse and Sverre Dueholm.
“Our dream is to address two challenges in the developing podcast industry,” explains Strunge. “The first is discoverability, where we intelligently match listeners to the content they love. And the second is monetization, where we provide a new stream of revenue for creators, allowing them to focus on creating and invest into great storytelling”.
By offering a freemium model, where a paid version provides unlimited listening and features, Strunge believes there is an opportunity to work closely with podcast creators to strengthen the podcast ecosystem and make it less reliant on advertising revenue.
“We want to become the preferred partner for creators, by both working closely with their content, curate and match it with each individual user, but also by offering a superior monetisation model,” he said when Podimo announced its Series A. The hope is that a more robust revenue stream will enable new content producers to enter the market and allow existing ones to earn more. In turn, that would provide the financial headroom to invest even more time and effort into high quality content.
“We have seen strong traction on our podcast and short form audio subscription service… and now more than 50% of our growth comes from our international markets,” Strunge tells me. “Our exclusive catalogue has grown to more than 600 exclusive productions, and our vision of building out revenue streams to creators of short form content really seems to be getting traction”.
