Spotify loves podcasts, as has been well documented. Some of its former executives clearly love podcasts too.
Eva Lægdsgaard spent nearly nine years at Spotify, rising to be its director of artist and label services in the Nordics – we last interviewed her in 2016 about Danish band Lukas Graham’s success – before leaving in September 2018. Now she’s one of five co-founders of a Denmark-based podcasting startup called Podimo, which has just raised €15m (around $16.5m) in Series A funding.
According to CrunchBase, this adds to a €6m seed round from July 2019. Podimo has an interesting model too: it’s a podcast platform currently available in Denmark and Germany which unlike most rivals actually shares its revenues with podcast creators. (Reminder: traditionally, podcast services haven’t paid any kind of per-download or per-stream royalties to the shows they carry).
Podimo is a bit like Luminary in the US, in that it has a free tier with podcasts under that model, but also a subscription tier with more than 300 original / exclusive shows, where “your membership fee is shared directly with any podcast creator (from anywhere in the world, exclusive or non-exclusive) who you listen to in a given month”. So not just royalties, but user-centric royalties. Lægdsgaard and her co-founders Morten Strunge, Nikolaj Koppel, Sverre Dueholm and Andreas Sachse plan to use the funding for expansion, original content investment and analytics tools.
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