DESCRIPT

Before Descript, Andrew Mason founded Groupon and took it public in 2011 in one of the biggest tech IPOs of its time. Then the stock collapsed and the board fired him in 2013.

His next act was Detour, an app for narrated audio walking tours of cities. Building those tours was painful.

The team had to edit audio the old way, dragging through waveforms by hand. So they built an internal tool that let them edit the audio by editing its written transcript instead.

Descript spun out as its own company in December 2017. A few months later, in April 2018, Bose bought what was left of Detour.

Mason kept the editing tool. That tool was Descript.

Descript is freemium. Anyone can use the basic editor for free.

To kill the limits, export in higher quality, and unlock the AI features, you pay per seat. Plans run from around $16 to $50 per user a month, with a custom enterprise tier on top.

Heavy AI use also burns metered credits. The pitch is simple.

Record, edit, and publish a podcast or video in one place instead of juggling five different apps.

Transcript-based editing is the core. You see the words, you delete a word, the audio deletes with it.

Overdub clones your voice so you can fix a flubbed line by typing instead of re-recording the whole thing. Studio Sound cleans up bad audio and makes a phone recording sound like a real microphone.

Automatic filler-word removal strips out every um and uh in one click. Underlord, added in 2024, is an AI co-editor that suggests cuts and edits for you.

The wedge was one weird idea. Edit audio by editing text.

Podcasters and YouTubers got it instantly. Then Descript kept bolting on AI.

In 2019 it bought Lyrebird, a voice-cloning startup, and turned it into the Overdub feature. In 2020 it added full video editing.

In 2023 it bought SquadCast to handle remote recording. By 2024 it had wrapped all the AI into an agent called Underlord.

Each step pulled in a new slice of creators.

AI is eating its own moat. The thing that made Descript special, clean transcription and voice cloning, is getting cheap and commoditized.

ElevenLabs does voice. Otter does transcription.

Adobe and ByteDance-owned CapCut have far more users and far deeper pockets. Descript has to stay the easiest all-in-one tool or risk getting squeezed from both ends.

In August 2025 Mason stepped back to Executive Chairman and Laura Burkhauser took over as CEO.

Andreessen Horowitz backed Descript from the very first $5 million seed in 2017. It kept investing through every single round after that.

Redpoint co-led the Series A. Spark Capital led the Series B.

The headline backer is the OpenAI Startup Fund, which led the $50 million Series C in 2022. Angels include Naval Ravikant, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, and YouTuber Casey Neistat.