Mangrove Leads €5m Seed Capital for Sybel

Led by Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners, Sybel, the world’s first platform for high-end audio content, recently raised €5 million in the seed round from Business Angels.

With smart speaker adoption skyrocketing, tech giants such as Amazon and Google are making significant investments in voice betting that the technology is poised to become the next primary interface for consumers and businesses. Mangrove has also stated its belief that there is a content play (i.e. entertainment) as consumers adapt to this new paradigm.

This is where French start up Sybel comes in. Created by Virginie Maire and Matthieu Viala, Sybel is a podcasting medium discovered by Mangrove in October 2018. The latter had spent over one year scouting for podcasting startups globally. 

What seemingly makes Sybel unique is its vision. The team spent months developing a world class product to make their dream a reality: to finally bring podcasting to the mass market by offering high end quality content and a superior user experience. 

Mangrove has cited several reasons for funding Sybel: first, increasing interest in podcasts among consumers (+30% since 2015 in the US); high end content is thought to attract an even larger podcast consumer base; the potential of podcasts to rival the music industry; Sybel's understanding of the way in which individual consumers access content and the personalised use of its platform to find the right content for everyone; the experience of the start up's founders in the media world- with Makever, a leading French TV production group, and FinderStudios, the second biggest multi-channel network in France, they already have two successful platforms to their names.

This information was first published on Silicon Luxembourg.