Google’s AI-powered note-taking and research assistant, NotebookLM, gained significant popularity upon its release. Its ability to rapidly generate summaries and reports, along with transforming large documents into AI-hosted “podcasts” for research purposes, drew considerable attention.
Encouraged by the success of that project, three developers who were involved in NotebookLM from the beginning are now building an audio-first app called Huxe. Like its predecessor, Huxe helps users dive into topics through AI-generated podcasts featuring multiple hosts. The startup announced on Tuesday that it has raised $4.6 million in funding from Conviction, Genius Ventures, Figma CEO Dylan Field, and Google Research Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.
The app initially launched in June via an invite-only system but is now publicly available on both iOS and Android platforms.
Raiza Martin, along with Jason Spielman and Stephen Hughes, left Google in December 2024 to explore their own entrepreneurial ideas. Initially, they launched a chatbot aimed at B2B use cases but later shifted focus to the consumer market, building a personal assistant in March 2025 capable of generating personalized images, videos, and audio content.
“At that stage, we realized people really enjoyed the ability to generate audio on various topics. We also noticed users tended to engage with the app at specific times of the day—often for daily briefings or news updates during their preparation routines,” Martin told TechCrunch.
This insight led the team to double down on audio, ultimately leading to the creation of Huxe.
Huxe provides a daily briefing based on your emails and calendar events to help you stay updated on your schedule. Additionally, it allows users to explore topics and generate AI-hosted podcast discussions—similar to NotebookLM. Users can interact with the hosts at any time, ask questions, or request alternative explanations of key points.
What sets Huxe apart is its ability to create a custom “live radio” station for any topic—whether it's tech news, sports, or celebrity gossip. After listening, the app delivers updates from multiple sources, ideal for tracking breaking news. It also features personalized interest-based audio推送, automatically generating content tailored to your preferences.
Martin noted that, much like in the early days of NotebookLM, Huxe has seen strong engagement from a core group of users who actively provide product feedback.
“This product works particularly well for people who spend their day staring at screens with dozens of browser tabs open. If you want to stay updated on emails, meetings, and news without looking at a screen, this is for you,” she said.
While Huxe fits well in the information and productivity space, entertainment is also a potential use case. Indian audio platforms like Pocket FM and Kuku FM, for example, are already leveraging AI to enable content creation by users. Huxe is not alone in focusing on audio as a medium—startups like ElevenLabs and Oboe are also tapping into this trend, as are tech giants like Google and Meta.
