News App 'Particle' Launches AI Podcast Clips

- The company was co-founded in 2023 by former Twitter senior director of product, Sara Beykpour, and another ex-Twitter engineer, Marcel Molina. Beykpour was involved in major product launches at Twitter, including Vine and Periscope. - Particle has raised a total of $15.3 million, including a $4.4 million seed round and a $10.9 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with media giant Axel Springer also investing. - The 'Podcast Clips' technology uses AI embedding models to analyze the relevance between news stories and podcast segments, identifying clips from 30 seconds to three minutes long. While it uses ElevenLabs for transcription, the core logic for precisely starting and ending the clips is proprietary to Particle. - This feature launch coincides with the introduction of a paid subscription tier called Particle Plus, which costs $2.99 per month. The company's broader business model is still in development, with options like revenue sharing with publishers under consideration. - The move into audio addresses a growing trend, with a recent Pew Research Center study indicating that 42% of Americans now get news from podcasts. - Particle's stated mission is to provide a "multi-perspective view of the news" to combat information overload and disjointed user experiences. It has content partnerships with publishers like Reuters, Fortune, and Agence France-Presse (AFP).