Exclusive: Audio tech platform Giide raises $1.6M

Giide, a Boulder, Colo.-based interactive audio tech company, has closed a $1.6 million seed round, CEO and co-founder Allison Kent-Smith exclusively tells Axios.

Why it matters: As audio consumption rises, content producers demand higher-quality creation tools.

Details: Giide has raised $2.7 million in total over the last 18 months. Kent-Smith declines to share the valuation on the latest round.

• The new round was led by Supernode Global, with participation from FirstMile Ventures, TechNexus, LearnStart, The Fund Rockies, Pathway Ventures and returning angel investors.  
• The funding will be put toward sales, marketing and customer success.

Context: Kent-Smith and CTO Scott Prindle, both ad agency veterans, founded Giide in 2018 as a communications and learning tool for businesses.

• Giide's team saw potential in a platform for combining audio and visual storytelling.
• "There has been this false construct around 'Oh, audio needs to be passive. I want to walk my dog and only listen,'" Kent-Smith says. "The deal is people are on the screen when they're listening, and they are multitasking."
• Giide has 50 business clients, including Emory University, TD Ameritrade, The Female Quotient and Cannes Lions.
• "I always thought that at least on the business side of content-making, it very much looked like the 1990s. But yet everything outside of the business world was progressing quite nicely," Kent-Smith says.
• Giide now offers a free tier, with additional features available for a monthly fee to individuals and businesses.

What they're saying: Giide is "different than this passive consumption of video or a podcast," Kent-Smith says. "We can send over click-through rates and really help people understand, what are people doing while they're listening? It no longer has to be a black box."