SNIPD

Snipd started as a hackathon project. Kevin Smith, Ferdinand Langnickel, and Mikel Corcuera entered HackZurich in 2021, Europe's biggest hackathon, and won it.

The idea came from a simple frustration. People listen to hours of podcasts and remember almost none of it.

You hear a brilliant point on a walk and it is gone by the time you get home. So they built a player that lets you capture those moments.

Then they turned the winning hack into a company based in Zurich.

Snipd is a podcast app, just a smarter one. Listening is free.

The money comes from a premium subscription that unlocks unlimited snips, full AI transcripts, and syncing to note apps like Notion and Obsidian. Casual listeners use it for free.

The power users, the ones building a second brain out of everything they hear, pay for the AI features. That is the whole bet.

Serious learners will pay to keep what they learn.

The main product is the Snipd podcast player for iPhone and Android. The signature feature is the snip.

Tap once and it saves the last chunk of audio along with an AI transcript. It also builds AI chapters so you can jump straight to the parts you care about, writes episode summaries, and lets you ask questions about what you just heard.

Anything you snip can sync out to Notion, Obsidian, Readwise, and other note tools.

Snipd grew by owning a niche instead of fighting Spotify head on. It went straight for the productivity and note-taking community.

The people who live in Notion, Obsidian, and Readwise. The snip feature was built for exactly them.

Hear a great idea, snip it, and it flows into your notes as searchable text. That crowd is loud online and loves recommending tools to each other.

Snipd rode that word of mouth instead of buying ads it could never have afforded on $700,000.

Snipd is a tiny team taking on companies worth hundreds of billions. Spotify and Apple own podcast distribution.

They can copy any feature they like whenever they feel like it. Snipd also raised very little money, just $700,000, so it cannot outspend anyone.

And AI transcription is expensive to run. Every snip and every transcript costs real compute.

The challenge is turning a beloved feature into a business big enough to survive the giants noticing.

Snipd raised a $700,000 pre-seed round in March 2022. It was oversubscribed, which means more investors wanted in than there was room for.

Swiss venture firm Wingman Ventures led it. US early-stage fund Acequia Capital joined, along with Gian Reto a Porta, who co-founded the Swiss fintech Contovista.

It is a small round by Silicon Valley standards. For a Zurich hackathon project, it was enough to turn a demo into a real app.