A startup with Louisville roots — and several local investors — is getting acquired.
Acast, the world’s largest independent podcast company, has signed an agreement to acquire Podchaser, a podcast database company, for an initial consideration of $27.2 million with potential add-ons of up to $6.8 million based on Podchaser's performance. Following the acquisition, Podchaser will continue to operate as a separate brand and independent business, according to a news release from Acast.
Podchaser, founded in 2016, has a fully remote team, but was previously based in Louisville before its founder and CEO Bradley Davis moved to Oklahoma City. It had a fair number of Louisville-area investors in its $1.65 million seed round in early 2020, including Poplar Ventures, Lunsford Capital, Connectic Ventures, Rounsavall Investments, Phoebe Wood, Ed Glasscock, Bill Strench, Richard Greenfield and Matthew Luckett.
The company, which aimed to be the “IMDb for podcasting,” now covers more than 4.5 million podcasts and over 1.7 billion data points within its global podcast database, the release said. It raised an additional $4 million in an early 2021 Series A, and its expected to be cash-flow positive in 2023.
“Podchaser and Acast have a shared ethos around supercharging the open podcast ecosystem and creating the best tools possible for listeners, podcasters and advertisers,” Davis said in the release. “It’s this conviction, coupled with Acast’s relentless execution, that makes it the perfect home for Podchaser’s continued mission.”
The transaction is expected to close on Aug. 1. Acast, a publicly traded company based in Stockholm, Sweden, had a revenue of $28.6 million in the first quarter of 2022.
“As true champions of open podcasting, Acast and Podchaser combined will accelerate the innovation and democratization of the podcasting ecosystem for podcasters, listeners and advertisers everywhere,” said Ross Adams, CEO of Acast, in the release. “Together we will unlock the vast opportunity that we know exists for open podcasting to not just have parity with the data held by closed, paywalled platforms, but to leap forward and surpass them.”
