Particle, the AI newsreader startup founded by former Twitter engineers, has launched Radar, a podcast intelligence platform that transcribes and indexes spoken conversations so people and AI agents can search them. The company is shifting more of its focus toward the technology after finding demand from hedge funds, AI search platforms, researchers, and data resellers.
Radar currently transcribes more than 130,000 podcasts and adds about 20,000 episodes to its index each day. Its coverage includes the Apple Top 200 podcasts across 135 categories.
Radar Turns Podcast Audio Into Searchable Data
Rather than only creating transcripts, Radar identifies speakers and tracks entities such as people, companies, brands, products, and topics discussed during episodes. Users can search across those conversations and extract relevant quotes and self-contained clips with timestamps.
The platform can also monitor mentions of selected entities across podcasts and send alerts immediately or as daily and weekly digests. Those alerts can be delivered through email, Slack, or webhooks and filtered by factors such as the guest, topic, or popularity of the podcast.
Particle CEO Sara Beykpour told TechCrunch that hedge funds have become the company’s highest-volume API customers. AI search company Exa is also among Radar’s partners.
Particle Shifts Its Podcast Technology Toward AI Agents
Radar grew from technology originally developed for Particle’s newsreader, which surfaced podcast clips alongside related news stories. The company later decided that the underlying podcast intelligence had more value as an independent API, particularly as AI agents increasingly rely on searchable external data.
Beykpour said many AI agents primarily crawl text on the web and cannot access spoken information unless it has first been transcribed. Particle’s data platform is designed to provide that audio layer through an API and Model Context Protocol integration.
Radar can also track listener ratings and reviews, episode advertising, sponsorship information, chart rankings, estimated audience sizes, and brand suitability. A dedicated advertising search tool can identify episodes in which a company advertises and track those appearances over time.
Particle’s official product updates show that the company has been expanding its podcast intelligence infrastructure, including faster episode indexing, entity search, alerts, and API access.
Radar Starts at $29 Per Month
Radar costs $29 per month per seat, while a $399 monthly business plan includes 20 seats. API customers receive custom pricing based on their requirements.
Particle plans to extend Radar beyond podcasts to other audio and video sources, including YouTube videos and news clips.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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