A Canadian entrepreneur has raised a sizeable round of seed funding for his startup, Dexa, which leverages artificial intelligence to offer “podcast assistants.”
Calgary native Riley Tomasek launched Dexa last year after prior entrepreneurial stints at Vancouver startups Standard Resume and Flight (which was acquired by Figma).
Tomasek and his team have secured $6 million from “a fantastic group of investors,” including Maple VC, The General Partnership, Abstract Ventures, Guillermo Rauch, Terrence Rohan, Casey Caruso, and Ben Cmejla.
With Dexa’s AI-powered podcast assistants, users can explore, search, and ask questions related to knowledge shared by creators.
“Whether you’re curious about sleep supplements, programming languages, growing an audience, or achieving financial freedom, Dexa has you covered,” the startup states online. “Dexa unlocks the wisdom of experts like Andrew Huberman, Lex Fridman, Rhonda Patrick, Shane Parrish, and many more.”
“The Dexa team has built a search engine for the modern age that lets users ask questions and get answers directly from the sources they trust,” said Ramtin Naimi, Founder of Abstract Ventures.
“Dexa’s ambitions go far beyond replacing ten blue links with two short paragraphs,” added Ben Cmejla from The General Partnership. “They are building a new knowledge graph around people, not web pages—a place where world-leading experts can tailor their counsel to millions and people can find wisdom, not summaries.”
Tomasek built Dexa after struggling to reference a specific byte of information he consumed among much other information during an hours-long Andrew Huberman podcast.
“The experience was so painful, I did what any engineer would do,” he says. “I built an app to be able to easily search previous episodes and shared it with my followers on X.”
Already, more than 50,000 users are visiting Dexa’s site each month, according to Tomasek.
“Since our initial launch just nine months ago, we’ve answered nearly [one million] queries,” he said.
Huberman himself has endorsed the startup, which Tomasek has based in New York.
“From the beginning, our mission has been to expand access to zero-cost information about science and science-related tools for mental health, physical health, and performance,” popular podcaster Huberman stated. “Partnering with Dexa furthers that mission by giving people an easy way to find and consume all of the knowledge across our nearly 200 episodes in a new way, as well as to provide our content to new audiences.”
The seed funding will be directed toward further investing in product development and building out Dexa’s engineering team, Tomasek said, adding that “podcasts are just the start.”
“I couldn’t be more excited about the future at Dexa,” the CEO stated. “We’ll be rolling out video search later this year as part of our mission to unlock the knowledge of trusted experts.”
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