Personalized News Radio App Swell Raises $5.4M

Swell, the app that brings a Pandora-like experience to news and talk radio content, is announcing that it has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding.

Accord to techcrunch.com, the round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with participation from Google Ventures, InterWest Partners, Correlation Ventures, and Draper Nexus Ventures. Concept.io, the startup that built Swell, previously raised a $1.8 million seed round from Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, DFJ, Andreessen Horowitz, Inspovation Ventures, and various angel investors.

Swell launched in June with content from NPR, American Public Media, ABC News, the BBC, TED Talks, and others. That content is all available through free podcasts in the iTunes story already, but through a combination of technology and human curation, Swell streams a mix of programs that become personalized to the listener’s interest over time.

Once you start the app, you can just let it run (particularly using Swell on your commute or while exercising), but you can also skip tracks that you don’t like, identify broad topics (such as technology) that you want to focus on at the moment, and bookmark programs for listening later.

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