The Scoop
A buzzy podcast startup has raised a new round of fundraising with a bet on science and technology.
The New York podcast company Kaleidoscope completed its Series A fundraise, the company confirmed this week. The round was co-led by Burda Principal Investments, a division of one of the largest media and tech companies in Germany, and North Base Media, the investment firm co-founded by former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli and former Dow Jones Reuters COO Stuart Karle. (Karle is an adviser to Semafor and Brauchli has been a Semafor contributor). Kaleidoscope also told Semafor that previous investors, including MTV’s Tom Freston and the Raine Group, participated in the new round, as well as biotech-focused VC firm Nimble Ventures. Kaleidoscope declined to share the valuation or amount raised.
Former iHeartMedia executive Mangesh Hattikudur and Sleepwalkers host Oz Woloshyn co-founded Kaleidoscope in 2022, with a focus on adventure stories and other forms of narrative podcasting. Over the last three years, they said, two of Kaleidoscope’s most successful podcasts to date, On Musk with Walter Isaacson and NSYNC singer Lance Bass’ The Last Soviet, helped the company crystallize its mission: creating shows that are curious about the future and advances in technology at a moment of uncertainty and pessimism.
“Our hope is that this entire network will be sort of like dispatches from the frontiers of knowledge,” Hattikudur said. “This sort of beautiful, energized, cool space where you can learn without feeling the chore of learning.”
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The company said in the coming months it will be rolling out an investigative series called America’s Crime Lab about Othram, the genetic forensics lab that helped provide breakthrough evidence in several high-profile murder cases, including the Gilgo Beach murders and the Idaho college killings. It is also planning new collaborations with Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson and podcast host Evan Ratliff, as well as the lighthearted, inquisitive debate show No Such Thing, which Kaleidoscope hopes to grow through a new distribution deal. It will also be building out its video offerings, as the rapid decline of cable television and rise of streaming video has created a surge in demand for video podcasting.
There’s a business incentive for the renewed focus on tech and science: The Kaleidoscope co-founders said they’ve seen a hunger among advertisers to be in front of quality content about the future backed by journalistic rigor.
“If you look at every other previous cable or magazine category which has been disrupted and overtaken by a podcast network — whether it’s like Lifetime or Cosmo becoming Call Her Daddy and Unwell, or Oxygen becoming Audiochuck, or Comedy Central becoming Smartless, or CNBC and Acquired — there is no Nat Geo and Discovery types of storytellers in podcasting,” Woloshyn told Semafor.