Riverside.FM announces $9.5m in series A funding led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six

Riverside.fm, the first audio-video platform for podcasts and broadcast media interviews, today announced $9.5M in Series A funding led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six with participation from Zeev-ventures.com, Casey Neistat, Marques Brownlee, Guy Raz, Elad Gil, Alexander Klöpping and other strategic investors, to support new platform features and hiring efforts. Regarded by the industry for its studio-quality local recording capabilities, Riverside.fm is the first to introduce dual HD recording and uploading from a web browser or iPhone app, the latter released earlier this month. With this launch the company debuts its “magic editor” feature with the distinctive ability to automate the recording, editing and uploading processes into one step.

Launched one year ago and now used by customers including Disney, Fox Sports, Marvel, TechCrunch and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Riverside.fm is the only platform in the market that enables local recording of lossless audio and 4K video tracks independent of internet connection speed. Now, anyone from individual podcasters to enterprise brands and media companies can record studio-quality interviews from anywhere with no loss in quality that look and sound like they were recorded in the same room.

“The platform my brother and I introduced has become the optimal technology for recording and publishing consumable audio-video content remotely” said Co-founder and CEO Nadav Keyson. “Riverside’s local recording engines are immune to bad internet connections and the technology enables interviewers, who are now increasingly recording and producing from their own homes, to look and sound like they’re using a million dollar studio. We’ve outfitted the platform with user-friendliness that’s easy to understand and with efficient capabilities that expedite the recording, producing and publishing processes like no platform has ever done before.”

Riverside.fm was launched in March 2020 by Nadav and his brother Gideon Keyson living in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv, respectively. The platform was originally created to host political debating sessions, however the pair quickly realized the capabilities were perfectly suited for the growing podcasting industry. As remote work became the norm during the pandemic, the pair further realized that professional interviewers across all media entities needed more than basic audio and video capabilities to produce compelling content.

In April 2021, Riverside.fm introduced several notable features and tech updates:

• Magic Editor: this new editing feature simplifies and merges the independent processes of recording, editing and uploading into one step. Until now it’s only been possible for producers to complete each step individually, but Riverside.fm’s magic editor automates the process and significantly reduces the time typically spent from recording to finally publishing.
• Smart Speakerview: Unlike conferencing tools that spottily pan the camera to the current speaker during live calls, Riverside.fm is the first platform to analyze based on the final recorded session and is programmed to automatically switch video to the appropriate person speaking in a perfect manner. For example, Riverside will not switch the camera should someone sneeze or cough during a live call, but based on the final recorded result, knows to switch views to a person speaking for a decent amount of time. Additionally, the technology enables panning one second before a person actually starts speaking, ensuring smooth transitions.
• iPhone App: Riverside.fm’s new iPhone app is the first iOS app to record and upload audio and video at the same time. As one records, footage simultaneously uploads to the cloud and the recording is downloadable instantly. In addition to Riverside.fm’s unique ability to record lossless audio and 4K video tracks independent of internet connection speeds, users can:
• Download separate audio and video tracks perfectly in sync
• Use Riverside.fm on a browser with no software installation required
• Achieve lightning-fast uploads that start upon recording and continue in the background throughout the session
• Automatically download local recordings following the conversation without need for guests to send audio files
• Automatically back up all recordings, which means no lost files, ever

“I’ve been saying it since the start of the pandemic–we witnessed five years of innovation condensed into five months—and Riverside.fm is one of the brightest examples of this acceleration,” said Alexis Ohanian, Founder of Seven Seven Six. “As many were forced to adapt to remote work and production teams struggled to deliver the same in person quality, from a distance—Gideon and Nadav saw an opportunity to not only solve a great need for creators, but to build an extraordinary product. As a creator myself, I can say from experience that Riverside’s quality is unmatched and the new editing capabilities are peerless. That’s remarkable on its own, but when you factor in how quickly they built it… this is a company to watch."

For more information on Riverside.fm, visit https://riverside.fm/. Users can download the new iOS app at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riverside-fm/id1554443872.

About Riverside.fm

Riverside.fm is the first audio-video platform for podcasts and TV interviews that enables local recording of lossless audio and 4K video tracks independent of internet connection. Many of the world’s largest media brands and celebrities like Hillary Clinton, BBC, Bloomberg, Spotify, Marvel and Verizon Media rely on the platform to record studio-quality interviews from anywhere, with no loss in recording quality. Riverside.fm makes it easy to record remote podcasts and video interviews that look and sound like they were recorded in the same room. The company was founded in 2019 by two brothers Gideon and Nadav Keyson and is currently headquartered in Tel Aviv.