Genesis Investments invested $ 150,000 in Ukrainian Elision Podcast Listening Platform

Startup Elision, which is developing a platform for distributing and monetizing podcasts, raised $ 150,000. The investor was Genesis Investments venture capital fund.

This is the first investment in Elision. The money will go towards further product development and marketing.

What is Elision?

Elision — is a podcasting platform for people who are interested in audio content. The startup was founded in November 2019 by Ukrainian Victor Pavluchinsky. There are 15 people in the team today.

The product allows podcasts to upload their content and make money on it, and for listeners to get unlimited access to all podcasts that are on the Internet. There are now over 30 million podcast episodes in the platform’s archive.

In Elision, you can not only listen, but also visualize the content. For this, the developers created RichAudio – an enriched audio format where the podcast can provide listeners with any additional visual materials: text, photos, illustrations, weblinks. Currently, the platform already has 500 exclusive episodes with RichAudio.

The target audience of the platform is people who are not yet listening and recording podcasts. For example, YouTube or Instagram bloggers and their subscribers. The goal of Elision is to increase the share of independent podcasters in the market, to enable them to compete with large labels for the listener and earn on their content.

Potential and business model

According to the founder and CEO of Elision Victor Pavluchinsky, the podcast industry has been growing at 50% per year for the past few years and promises to grow 10 times by 2026.

The beta version of the application on Google Play and the App Store has already been downloaded by more than 1.5 thousand users. According to the expectations of the startup creators, by the end of April the product will be released for 5,000 installations.

The Elision team is currently working on exclusive content. A full launch of the product on the US market is scheduled for May 1. Podcasts will be available free of charge with ads from start-up partners – or without ads by subscription for $ 7 per month. For residents of Ukraine will have a preferential price of UAH 100.

The plan of the creators of Elision is to achieve profitability in six months and develop content available on the platform.

“Genesis is primarily a strategic partner for us, which has enormous expertise in creating products. Thanks to their advice and support, we managed to avoid more than one mistake. For example, we were advised not to make our payment system in the application, but to use a third-party service – this saved us about a month of development”, – says Pavluchinsky.

“Victor and his partners are a very strong and enthusiastic team with experience in creating successful projects in Ukraine. Secondly, we look at the market. Podcasting is one of the fastest-growing media segments. Therefore, we are sure that the project will become one of the world leaders in its market”, – says Vitaliy Laptenok, CEO of Genesis Investments.

Source: ain.ua