Tree Goat has announced a funding round to scale tech and attract strategic partners to bring its first product, Marbyl, to market. Marbyl makes podcast content deeply searchable and easily shareable. Its podcaster web tool automatically extracts the regions of highest interest within content, then optimises their discovery by driving new audiences, all without the podcaster having to do a thing.
Tree Goat has launched a $10m funding round to bolster Marbyl's AI capabilities and amplify its product infrastructure and seeks an equity-focused lead investor. Since 2019, Marbyl's talented team has been working hard to develop the platform. The tech has become highly accurate at generating five 15-to-90-second clips (or 'marbyls') from the most engaging parts of any episode. Other AI-generating tools have yet to achieve Marbyl's quality level and don’t possess its proprietary frameworks for understanding the context, topic, and viral potential of audio regions.
Marbyl's unique ability to identify and unlock the moments that matter most from podcasts and get them to the consumers who need to hear them removes the discoverability and monetisation roadblocks currently faced by most podcasters.
"The lack of viable options for finding and retaining an audience is one of the biggest problems the podcasting industry faces. I deeply believe Marbyl has the ability to solve the problem of discoverability and search-ability in podcasting. Marbyl's hands-off approach to content creation is game-changing. Most AI content tools completely lack in their ability to capture moments that have true emotional value and a high likelihood of virality. Marbyl has given me hope that indie podcasters everywhere will not only be able to find and grow a sizable audience, but also, make a living doing what they love. I am honored to be on the ground floor with this revolutionary technology that is swooping in to finally give podcasters the support they’ve been needing," said Lauren LoGrasso, Host and EP of Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso, one of the most awarded indie podcasts in the world.
Marbyl's mission is to democratise the podcasting industry by making all of its content highly accessible; its end-to-end ecosystem is therefore designed for integration everywhere. Its innovative app, dashboard, API, and widgets provide access to Marbyl's ever-growing sea of stored quality moments, in addition to searchable transcripts for every show on the platform; this makes every podcaster with Marbyl ADA-compliant and their work accessible to the countless millions of people who are hearing impaired.
Tree Goat plans to utilise its $10m funding round to accelerate Marbyl's time to market by advancing its tech ecosystem. The Producer Portal, API, and widgets require more user testing, search, and machine learning intelligence to become fully available for users. The full raise will allow the company to move through three phases of growth; from market traction and initial revenue; to advanced AI models; to global scale and either Series A or acquisition.
The investment will also increase market share and distribution. Since the podcasting market offers various business and consumer opportunities, Tree Goat seeks a strategic investor who can advise them for optimal growth. This person will provide financial support and become integral to company development.
Podcasts are quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing sectors in media. It's no surprise since listening to spoken word content can allow consumers to quell feelings of loneliness. According to research, over 464.7 million people listen to podcasts worldwide. This number equates to 22 per cent of internet users.
As more podcasts emerge and discovery options remain low, consumers struggle to find shows they enjoy and podcasters struggle to be found and heard, the two ingredients essential for getting paid. Podcast-playing apps and search engines don't understand how to 'see' what's being talked about inside of episodes (which is why search engines still don't have an 'audio' tab); therefore, can't surface the most entertaining or topic-based bits consumers would like to find when performing searches, creating a large problem for both podcasters and their target audiences.
Marbyl understands this problem firsthand and is bringing 'vision' to audio so that engaging things getting said, can finally get found. Sherry Mills, CEO and co-founder of Tree Goat Media is behind the flourishing tech start-up. Her lifelong career as a multimedia artist presented a myriad of challenges with how to stand out and monetize her art inside a sea of creators struggling to do the same.
As she began creating her podcast, Sherry noticed not only how familiar the obstacles were that were also keeping podcasters from becoming profitable and building audiences, but how intensified these issues seemed to be inside this industry in particular. She decided it was time to do something about it, so she teamed up with Michael Kakoyiannis, a veteran broadcasting executive and operator, to co-found Tree Goat Media and build the Marbyl platform.
To harness Marbyl's intelligence, podcasters register their RSS with the platform and then Marbyl's powerful Machine Learning and AI models automatically transcribe all of the episodes in their back catalogs and extract five marbyls for each of them. This process automatically repeats as new episodes are posted to their RSS feeds. Marbyls are stored in the searchable catalog of the Producer Portal and made discoverable by users of the Marbyl app and the audiences of Marbyl's syndication and integration partners.
Tree Goat has previously bootstrapped its way to completing a $4.6m funding round, which served to deeply root Marbyl in its current product development phase. Tree Goat has secured two patents for its machine learning technology; today receiving strong validation from the industry.
This current investment round is crucial for transforming podcast content into an automated revenue generator. Marbyl is currently standing on a launch pad and is ready to execute its ambitious plans to revolutionise audio search and expand globally.