Radar makes podcasts queryable by AI agents
Covered by Signal Brief for B2B SaaS product managers — one of 5 tools in Issue #12 · techcrunch.com
What it does
Particle on Wednesday introduced Radar, a podcast intelligence platform that transcribes more than 130,000 podcasts — the largest transcribed podcast index in existence, the company claims, covering all of Apple’s Top 200 shows across 135 verticals and adding 20,000 episodes a day — and makes the conversations inside them searchable by humans and AI agents alike. Radar doesn’t just transcribe; it extracts meaning: speaker labels, entity recognition for people, companies, brands, products, and topics, self-contained clips with timestamps, and pre-chosen notable moments. It tracks entity mentions across the whole index and sends alerts by email, Slack, or webhook the moment they occur — filterable down to “only when this guest discusses this topic” — or as daily and weekly digests. There is even a podcast ads search engine that finds every episode in which a given company advertises and tracks that presence over time, alongside audience-size estimates, sponsorship data, and brand-suitability signals. The pivot from Particle’s AI newsreader, where podcast clips surfaced beside related news stories, is deliberate: the real product is the API and MCP server, which let agents query spoken-word intelligence programmatically. Co-founder and CEO Sara Beykpour’s framing: agents are generally blind to audio unless someone has transcribed it. The market agrees so far — hedge funds are the highest-volume API customers, alongside AI search platforms and data resellers, and Exa, the search API provider for agents, is a partner. Pricing starts at $29 a month per seat, with a $399-a-month business plan covering 20 seats and custom API pricing. The company plans to expand beyond podcasts to YouTube videos and news clips.
Why it matters for PMs
Podcasts are where your buyers, competitors, and analysts talk unscripted — and until now that corpus was invisible to your research stack and to your agents. Practical uses for a B2B PM today: an always-on competitive signal when a rival or a key account is mentioned; a filtered feed of category conversations piped into your feedback triage; a research agent that can finally cite what an analyst actually said on a show instead of what a summary claimed. Two strategic lessons on top. One: Particle’s pivot is a template — a beloved consumer feature became an API-first data product the moment agents needed what it had, and “agents are blind to audio” was the gap worth betting the company on. Whatever unstructured surface your domain hides in — calls, video, community audio — someone will index it; the question is whether it’s you. Two: the mirror. Your own content is becoming machine-queryable too — webinars you’ve run, podcasts you’ve sponsored, talks your team has given. An agent can now binge all of it and form a view of your positioning. Decide what that view should be before the index decides for you.
The link Signal Brief published for this tool in Issue #12.
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