The Reddit logo. Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr.

CTech – Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian is leading a $9.5 million series A investment round in Israeli audio-video podcast platform Riverside.fm through his Seven Seven Six fund. Zeev Ventures, Casey Neistat, Marques Brownlee, Guy Raz, Elad Gil, Alexander Klöpping, and other strategic investors also participated in the round.

Launched one year ago, Riverside.fm is currently being used by customers including Disney, Fox Sports, Marvel, TechCrunch, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is the only platform in the market that enables local recording of lossless audio and 4K video tracks independent of internet connection speed.

Riverside.fm was launched in March 2020 by Nadav Keyson and his brother Gideon, who is still living at the student dorms at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva. The company currently employs 22 people after only including the Keyson brothers when it first raised funds.

“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.”

“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.”