Cast Insights Raises $4.5M Pre-Seed to Replace Forecasting With Real-Time Intelligence From the World's Ephemeral Speech Data

New platform launches from stealth to index the world's ephemeral speech data, helping institutional decision-makers detect convergences and divergences before they reach market consensus

SAN FRANCISCO, July 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cast Insights today announced the launch of its AI-powered platform that turns spoken content into competitive intelligence for high-stakes decision makers, alongside a $4.5 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Abstract Ventures, with participation from HF0, Village Global, Max Ventures, Embassy Ventures, Stratus Ventures, and others. The funding will accelerate Cast Insights' mission to ingest and analyze publicly available spoken word at a global scale.

The company is built on a simple but disruptive premise: the future is often a comforting story we create because we don't fully understand the present. Rather than relying on traditional forecasting, Cast Insights focuses on understanding reality as it happens, constantly gathering and interpreting large amounts of public conversation to identify convergences, the recurring patterns and signals emerging across society, markets, and institutions, and divergences, the breaks from those patterns that signal new disruptions. In this view, tomorrow is not a guess, but the continuation or interruption of forces already at work today.

Using AI, Cast Insights ingests spoken audio from thousands of sources worldwide and transforms it into a real-time intelligence layer. At the center of the platform is what the company calls ephemeral speech data, a new category of real-time intelligence built from spoken information that is everywhere, constantly renewing, and disappearing almost as soon as it is created. Beyond simply transcribing speech, Cast Insights analyzes who is speaking, what is being said, when it's happening, and how narratives and sentiment evolve over time, creating a permanent, searchable record of data of what would otherwise vanish. Built for investors, policy teams, corporate strategists, and newsrooms, the platform ensures that insights spoken across the world no longer vanish in real time and instead, become discoverable and actionable as they unfold.

"We've always had this strange cultural obsession with forecasting the future, when the real problem is that we barely understand the present," said Otávio Costa Miranda, CEO and Co-Founder of Cast Insights. "Most of what gets said in the world every day across radio stations, legislatures, podcasts, local broadcasts is ephemeral by nature. It surfaces publicly, it influences people, and then it vanishes. We call this ephemeral speech data, and it's the largest uncaptured dataset in the world. What Cast does is make the present legible in real time so that instead of guessing where things are going, our clients can see convergences forming and divergences emerging before they reach consensus. The signal is always there. It just slips through everyone's fingers."

The volume of ephemeral speech data is staggering and largely untapped. Currently, there are more than 4.5 million podcasts and 185 million episodes existing globally, alongside more than 44,000 radio stations broadcasting across 100+ languages and geographies, each one a constant stream of public content.

Since its launch, Cast Insights has gathered more than 2.3 million hours of speech data from over 20 countries and 10 languages. In the coming weeks, the company plans to scale to 20 million hours processed and 500,000 hours of live content monitored daily, at which point it will have built the largest American ephemeral speech dataset in the world, covering every major radio station and television broadcast across the country, plus podcasts at scale.

Cast Insights was invited to join the HF0 Residency, the most exclusive startup programs for repeat founders. HF0 only takes 10 teams per cohort, with the goal of achieving 12 months of business growth in 12 weeks.

"When we first met Otto and the team, we had this moment that keeps happening with the best founders we back, we thought, 'Wait, that doesn't exist yet? How does that not exist?'" said Evan Stites-Clayton from HF0. "Once Otto showed us the platform's features like real-time alerts within thirty seconds of broadcast, speaker-level voice tracking, narrative curves across thousands of sources, it became very clear this team is building something the entire institutional world is going to depend on. This is the kind of company where every week you peel back another layer and it just gets bigger."

Cast Insights is available to institutional clients, with pricing available upon request. To learn more, please visit: https://castinsights.com/.

About Cast Insights

Founded in 2025, Cast Insights is a leading real-time spoken intelligence platform that ingests public speech from television, radio, podcasts, and livestreams and transforms it into structured, real-time insights. By converting speech into searchable data, Cast Insights enables hedge funds, policy teams, strategy groups, and newsrooms to track emerging narratives, compare statements across time and sources, and receive alerts the moment something meaningful is said. The platform replaces manual monitoring and fragmented listening with a living, queryable archive of the spoken world, allowing organizations to move faster, think more clearly, and act with greater confidence. Cast Insights is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by leading investors, including Abstract Ventures, Village Global, HF0, Max Ventures, and Founder Embassy. To learn more, visit: https://castinsights.com/ 

SOURCE Cast Insights