Particle Lance Radar: A Search API for 130,000 Podcasts

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Key Takeaways

1Over 130,000 transcribed podcasts, with 20,000 episodes added daily

2Programmatic access via API and MCP for AI agents and businesses

3$29/month per user, enterprise offer at $399 for 20 users

💡Why it matters — AI agents are typically blind to audio; Radar provides them with a layer of access to podcast content via an API, according to its leadership.

Particle unveils Radar, a service that converts podcast conversations into actionable and queryable information for AI agents. The platform combines transcription, semantic understanding, and extraction of key excerpts, with a broad coverage announced. According to its management, hedge funds are already using it via the API. The product is marketed through individual subscriptions and offers an enterprise plan.

Programmatic Access and Pricing: API, MCP, and Subscriptions

Beyond a web interface, Particle presents the API and an MCP as the main access points to intelligence derived from podcasts, allowing AI agents and companies to integrate it directly into their workflows. The offering starts at $29 per month per user, with an enterprise plan at $399 per month for 20 users. API clients have custom pricing. Dedicated advertising research is also presented with additional monetization potential.

Entity Monitoring and Configurable Alerts

Radar produces transcriptions with speaker labels and metadata, identifying people, companies, brands, products, and topics. The service tracks entity mentions and sends notifications in real-time or as daily or weekly summaries. These alerts arrive via email, through Slack, or via webhook and can be filtered to highlight specific guests on particular themes. The search can be limited, for example, to the most prominent podcasts. For a quick overview, Radar extracts standalone clips with timestamps, and notable excerpts are preselected, according to management. The platform also tracks mentioned topics, who or what is mentioned and when, as well as listener notes and reviews and episode advertisements. A dedicated engine catalogs every advertising occurrence of a company and tracks its evolution. Other tools provide analyses of political bias, ranking data, audience estimates, sponsorship information, and brand relevance.

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Coverage: Over 130,000 Podcasts and 20,000 Episodes per Day

Particle states that Radar transcribes over 130,000 podcasts and includes the top 200 Apple podcasts across 135 verticals. The index is enriched with an additional 20,000 episodes daily. The service is presented as the largest active podcast transcription system.

Adopters and Partners: Focus on Finance and Exa

According to Sara Beykpour, hedge funds are among the first users and are the largest clients integrating directly with the API. AI research platforms and data resellers also count among the paying clients. Exa, a specialist in API search for AI agents, is a partner of Radar. The tools are also usable by profiles such as journalists or researchers.

Origin, Pivot to API, and Beyond Podcasts

Originating from a team of former Twitter engineers, Particle initially tested the interest in audio excerpts within its news reading app, before deeming this value too confined to a reader. The company then pivoted to create a dedicated API for podcast intelligence. Its management states that it aims to centralize the intelligence of new media and audio within the API, noting that existing agents and services remain text-centric and generally do not perceive audio without transcription. Radar is thus designed to make podcast conversations discoverable and actionable, and it is set to expand to other audio formats such as YouTube videos or news excerpts.