AI Startup Cast Insights Targets Untapped Data From Radio, Podcasts, TV.

Cast Insights, an artificial intelligence startup developing technology to analyze spoken content from radio, podcasts, TV and other sources, says it has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding to expand its real-time intelligence platform.

In a news release, the company says the funding will help accelerate development of its technology, which is designed to capture and analyze what it calls “the world’s ephemeral speech data” — conversations and commentary that often disappear after being broadcast.

The investment round was led by Abstract Ventures, with participation from HF0, Village Global, Max Ventures, Embassy Ventures and Stratus Ventures.

Cast Insights said its platform is designed to provide organizations with immediate access to trends, narratives and sentiment emerging across spoken media. The system uses artificial intelligence to transcribe audio, identify speakers, monitor changes in conversations and detect shifts in public discussion.

“We’ve always had this cultural obsession with forecasting the future, when the real problem is we barely understand the present,” Otávio Costa Miranda, co-founder and CEO of Cast Insights, says in the release. “What Cast does is make the present legible in real time so that instead of guessing where things are going, our clients can see convergences forming and divergences emerging before they reach consensus. The signal is always there. It just slips through everyone’s fingers.”

The company says its technology has processed more than 2.3 million hours of speech across 20 countries and 10 languages. With the new funding, Cast Insights plans to expand its database to more than 20 million hours of processed speech and increase its ability to monitor as much as 500,000 hours of live content daily.

Cast Insights says its platform can deliver alerts within 30 seconds of a broadcast and track conversations at the speaker level across thousands of sources. The company said potential uses include monitoring corporate communications, political developments, consumer sentiment, policy discussions and market-moving events.

The startup says much of the information contained in live speech remains difficult to collect and analyze because broadcasts, interviews and discussions are often not preserved in searchable formats.

“When we first met Otávio and the team, we had this moment that keeps happening with the best founders we back — we thought, ‘Wait, that doesn’t exist yet? How does that not exist?’” says Evan Stites-Clayton of HF0. “Once Otávio showed us the platform’s features, like real-time alerts within 30 seconds of broadcast, speaker-level voice tracking and narrative curves across thousands of sources, it became very clear this team is building something the entire institutional world is going to depend on.”

Cast Insights said it plans to use the new capital to expand global coverage and continue building what it describes as one of the largest searchable databases of spoken public information. It’s among a growing group of AI companies focused on transforming unstructured information — including audio, video and conversational data — into searchable intelligence for businesses, investors and other organizations.