Sounder Acquires Podnods

Sounder, an end-to-end audio management, distribution, monetization, and analytics platform, announced its acquisition of Podnods, a podcasting discovery and analytics technology startup. 

Founded in 2019, Sounder focuses on making audio more discoverable while supporting a thriving and innovative ecosystem. Its proprietary audio search technology enhances the discoverability of audio content.

Podnods was launched in 2020 by group of heavy podcast listeners with backgrounds in AI and scalable tech, with the goal of improving podcast discovery for listeners and helping podcasters grow their audiences and revenue. 

“Sounder and Podnods started with the same mission: to help creators be heard. Audio has been deprived of true technological innovation for quite some time and by bringing our two companies together, we aim to deliver the next generation of audio technology, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, to fuel growth for creators everywhere,” said Kal Amin, cofounder and CEO of Sounder. 

Podnods’ proprietary natural language processing (NLP) technology has processed and indexed over 1.7 million of the world’s 2 million podcasts (and their episodes), generating an audio data graph of more than 3 billion data signals, explained a press release. With combining Podnods’ cross-podcast analytics with Sounder’s in-episode keyword-based analytical capabilities, Sounder plans to create new taxonomies and personalize discovery and recommendations at a greater level.

Podnods cofounder and CEO Mercan Topkara will become Sounder’s new CTO. She will lead Sounder’s global engineering department, and spearhead the growth of the company’s newly established research and development center in New York. Before cofounding Podnods, Topkara was VP of Data Products at Luminary Media, a podcast publisher, as well as a research engineer at JW Player and a research scientist at IBM. She holds a doctorate in computer science from Purdue University. 

Goran Krgovic, Sounder’s cofounder and current CTO, will be chief architect, reporting to Topkara.

“Podnods solved discovery for podcast listeners, and Sounder did it for podcast creators — you need both to change the industry,” Topkara said. “Our complementary approaches to processing and indexing audio content will position us to improve both discovery and engagement dramatically.”