On September 11, 2020, Chartable, a start-up known for its authoritative podcast download charts, announced it has raised $2.25 million in seed funding, led by Initialized Capital, which also contributed to Chartable’s $1.5 million round last year. Other investors include Naval Ravikant, Greycroft Partners, The Fund, Weekend Fund, Jim Young, and Lukas Biewald. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati supported Chartable in the transaction.
The founders of Chartable built the company to give publishers and advertisers the insights they need to understand their audience and their business. That meant creating industry-wide charts but also helping publishers aggregate their listening data across different podcast apps and launching products like SmartAds (to measure the effectiveness of podcast advertising), SmartLinks (to track the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns at driving podcast downloads), and SmartPromos (an attribution product for cross-podcast promotional campaigns).
Founded in 2018, Chartable says it’s now tracking 1 billion podcast downloads and ad impressions every month, compared to 100 million downloads a year ago. While the start-up offers a free version for independent podcasters, the company said it’s currently working with eight of the 10 biggest podcast publishers globally.
The Wilson Sonsini corporate team that supported Chartable in the transaction was Andrew Sparks, Nico Kerr, and paralegal Anna Johansen.
For more information, please see TechCrunch's article covering the news.