We are incredibly excited to announce that Bose Ventures, the strategic investment group within Bose Corporation, is investing in RadioPublic.
“As podcasting continues to expand as go-to entertainment for millions of people, we’ve been impressed by RadioPublic’s efforts to lead and drive this ecosystem,” says Steve Romine, managing director of Bose Ventures. “Bose sees opportunities to provide great user experiences for podcast consumers, and we look forward to helping RadioPublic on this journey.”
When we first drove up to The Mountain — Bose’s headquarters just outside of Boston — we walked down a hallway lined with the company’s history of innovation, and entered a room to find a group of engineers, designers, product managers, and strategists who share our passion for audio excellence and the promise of podcasting.
One of the trends driving podcasting’s growth is the rapid proliferation of connected speakers and headphones. Millions of people now listen to streaming audio on these devices, and are seeking simple ways to hear the shows they love, and new ones too.
As an industry pioneer, Bose brings research depth and consumer scale to this wave of audio adoption. The Bose team has come to us with an interest in exploring the podcast landscape and to see what we can do to improve the user experience. We also welcome Bose as a kindred mission-driven company, rooted in its values. And it doesn’t hurt that we’re just a few miles away here in Boston.
At RadioPublic we are obsessed with the idea that podcasting should be as intuitive as radio. We want to weave together podcasting’s diversity of voices and choices with the seamless experience of a personalized, serendipitous, “station” just for you.
We’ve made big strides on that front in the first 18 months of our startup journey— bringing on the world’s first Podcast Librarian; pioneering episode-level playlists for curation and discovery; developing “radio mode” and prioritization algorithms to guide new users into lean-back listening; creating our own semantic topic extraction methods to enable recommendations; launching Paid Listens as a step towards a more sustainable and flexible advertising model for podcasting.
Ultimately we are making a feedback loop to help podcasters create stories and sounds for new listening experiences. Radio evolved to fit the contours of broadcast and the designs of the dial, so what are the possibilities for podcasting now in a connected world of infinite interactivity?
Bose joins an exceptional group of founding partners and investors helping us answer that question.
Stay tuned!
