Huxe, an app created by a former NotebookLM developer that allows users to enter prompts to generate a podcast or podcast series about a topic, is shutting down. The announcement comes a day after Spotify released a personal podcast feature that works similarly.
The company said it has removed the app from the App Store and Play Store and that it will work for seven days if users already have the app installed. We will then delete all data about you. The startup did not disclose the reason for the shutdown.
“We have decided to discontinue Huxe. Our team is working on new things and will not continue developing the product,” an email sent to customers said.
The consumer AI market is highly competitive, and startups’ core products often become commoditized features of larger companies. The creation of podcasts for knowledge purposes has followed a similar trajectory. After NotebookLM popularized this feature, other big companies like Adobe, Amazon, ElementalLabs, Meta emulated this feature in a sense, and now Spotify emulates it. Google also released another feature to create podcasts based on your Discover feed.
Huxe was founded in late 2024 by former Google employees Raiza Martin, Jason Spielman, and Stephen Hughes. The startup had raised $4.6 million in funding from Conviction, Genius Ventures, Figma CEO Dylan Field, and Google Research chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Other startups, Anchor co-founder and former Spotify executive’s app Oboe, and Sun, part of the a16z speedrun cohort, are looking to build audiences for audio-focused learning.
As AI models improve, they will be able to convert one format to another, such as text to audio or audio to video. Businesses that only focus on one type of conversion modality for consumers may find it difficult to drive long-term app usage and revenue.
AI is allowing companies to ship features quickly and bring their products to parity, which could have an impact on some startups. For Huxe, generating podcasts about a topic has become a commoditized feature in many apps and services. This could prove difficult to scale your service to millions of users and get them to pay for your app.
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