Zencastr220

The podcast production company Zencastr may be six years old, but it just wrapped its first round of fundraising. The company that bills itself as a provider of “Hi-Fi Audio” and video podcasting reportedly raised $4.6 million in seed funding. 

“In order to accelerate the creation of products that properly live up to the needs and expectations of our creators, we have decided to raise a round of funding. This capital support will allow us to move fast and build the ultimate podcast creator platform,” said co-founder and CEO Josh Nielsen and co-founder and Chief Product Officer Adrian Lopez in a joint blog post. Investors are said to have included Utah-based Kickstart, with angel investors including former Flipagram executives Brian Dilley and Farhad Mohit and former Skullcandy CEO Jeremy Andrus, among others.

Not unlike Zoom, the pandemic has also put more demand on Zencastr as more creators moved to producing their shows from home. The company said it has seen the number of podcast hours created with its technology increase 147% since the start of the pandemic. It estimates that roughly six percent of all podcasts worldwide are created with Zencastr.

“This company started off pretty small and didn’t have a lot of resources,” says co-founder and CEO Josh Nielsen, who told TechCrunch their small, self-funded team has operated as a startup even as it has seen its size increase. “But we’ve always been profitable, we’ve always been growing. We still are, but we’re raising money to accelerate that growth,” he said.

Video Recording Moves To ‘Open Beta’

Time will tell whether Zencastr’s growth will continue as the impact of the pandemic lessens and presumably more producers head back into the studio. But executives said the overall growth of the podcast industry should allow them to expand even post-COVID.

One factor will be the addition of new products, such as Zencastr’s new video recording feature. The company said Monday that it is launching the feature in “open beta.” Nielsen and Lopez call video “the next step” for the company in helping creators produce their content. “Remote HD video is only the first of many great products we have planned to help streamline your workflow, build your community, and monetize the efforts of podcasters around the world,” they said. It had been in private beta since last June.

While the company promises a “more professional experience,” it said no changes are planned for its audio recording other than giving podcasters the additional option to view your guests live and record HD 1080p video. The only hiccup is that Zencastr is still trying to get its audio and video supported by Firefox. It said that many of the APIs it needs to make the highest quality audio and video are not currently supported by Firefox. “We hope to revisit Firefox support once they offer a more robust media recording feature set,” said Nielsen and Lopez. They said the co-founder of Firefox has a new privacy focused browser called Brave which now supports Zencastr. It also now also supports Microsoft’s Edge browser.

Hobbyist Tier Waivers Continue

When the coronavirus sent many podcasters into work-from-home mode last spring, Zencastr announced it has lifted the limits on its free “hobbyist” tier. The change meant Zencastr won’t place any limits on recording hours or the number of participants in a podcast. Typically it only allows up to two guests and eight hours per month in the free tier.

In a joint announcement, Nielsen and Lopez said Monday that Zencastr will continue to waive the recording time and participant limits lifted for Hobbyist users. “Connecting with others is more crucial than ever and we are honored to facilitate those conversations,” they said.