Descript, the audio and video editing software company, has struck a deal to buy the cloud recording studio platform SquadCast. Descript founder and CEO Andrew Mason says that while they had prided themselves on building a tool that handled the various parts of a podcaster’s workflow, the pandemic shifted to remote recording and that created a hole in their product.
“With everything else we were doing, we just never felt we were in a position to make the investment required to solve the problem correctly. And it was a bummer, because remote recording has become a staple of every podcaster’s tool stack,” Mason says in a blog post announcing the deal. He says the combination of the two companies means a podcaster can now record a podcast, including video, with hosts and guests anywhere in the world, and have the entire recording waiting for them in Descript as soon as they are finished.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Descript raised $50 million last November in a Series C financing round that will help fund the deal.
SquadCast was launched in 2017 by Zach Moreno and Rockwell Felder. The Oakland, CA-based company offers a cloud-based platform that offers a remote recording studio to capture audio and video conversations from anywhere in the world. It has customers in more than 220 countries and is used by podcast companies including Spotify, ESPN, NPR, and iHeartMedia.
In phase one of the rollup, Mason says SquadCast will remain a standalone service, with two main changes. The first is they have streamlined the integration with Descript. The second is related to price. For paying Descript customers, they now get SquadCast for free.
In the second phase, SquadCast’s technology will be fully integrated into Descript and they plan to wind it down as a standalone service. That means users will be able to make remote recordings from the Descript app and have them ready to edit as soon as you’re finished. “We’re working on this, but don’t have an exact date yet,” Mason said.