You’ve more than likely had that moment where you’re sitting with a friend, the conversation is flowing, you’re making each other laugh, maybe even saying something surprisingly insightful. Then someone says it: “We should start a podcast.”

Most of the time, that idea fades as quickly as it came. Not because it’s necessarily a bad idea, but because actually making a podcast has always been kind of a pain. Between recording setups, editing software, and promotion, many argue that the barrier to entry is higher than expected. 

That’s the gap a new platform, Rebel Audio, is trying to close.

Rebel Audio positions itself as an all-in-one podcasting platform designed for first-time and early-stage creators. The idea is simple: Instead of juggling multiple tools, subscriptions, and workflows, podcasters can create their show, record it, edit it, upload cover artwork, create transcripts, clip content for social, and publish, all without ever leaving the platform. 

Rebel Audio launched a private beta with a waitlist earlier this month, and it recently secured $3.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round, suggesting that investors see real opportunity in simplifying the podcasting process. An official rollout to the public begins on May 30.

The timing of the launch makes sense. Podcasting is exploding, with the industry projected to reach $114.5 billion by 2030. According to Riverside, more than 584 million people listened to podcasts in 2025, with predictions that this number will rise to 619 million by 2026.

Competitors like Spotify for Creators (formerly Spotify for Podcasters) have already adopted a similar all-in-one approach, offering tools like unlimited hosting, video podcast uploads, audience tools, analytics, and monetization through ads and subscriptions. However, Rebel Audio argues that none of these solutions deliver a truly “360-degree” creation suite in the way its platform aims to. Other popular rivals include Riverside, Adobe Audition, and Descript.

Monetization is another core part of the pitch. Rather than treating revenue as something that comes later, Rebel Audio integrates it from the beginning. Creators can tap into advertising, brand partnerships, dynamic ad insertion, and listener subscriptions integrated within the platform. 

Unsurprisingly, Rebel Audio’s experience is also heavily powered by AI. 

The platform includes an AI assistant that helps with everything from generating show names and descriptions to suggesting ideas and producing cover art based on a concept. There are also AI-powered transcription, dubbing, and translation capabilities, as well as voice cloning for ad reads. 

However, building a podcasting platform centered around AI could introduce criticism. 

The use of AI-generated images and voice cloning remains a sensitive topic across the creative industry. Concerns around training data, originality, and ownership continue to surface, and some creators remain wary of tools that blur those lines. Streaming platforms like Spotify and Deezer have already had to address issues related to low-quality, mass-produced AI content, sometimes referred to as “AI slop.” 

Rebel Audio told TechCrunch that it has implemented guardrails to address these concerns. Voice cloning is opt-in and requires users to confirm they have the rights to use a given voice, and the platform includes safeguards aimed at preventing deepfake content. Similarly, the company says its AI-generated cover art tools are designed with moderation systems to block inappropriate or non-compliant imagery, particularly anything that could violate distribution platform guidelines.

Rebel Audio was developed in partnership with AI consulting firm Lattice Partners.

Behind the scenes, the company’s leadership brings a lot of industry experience. Founder Jared Gutstadt previously launched production company Audio Up in 2020. Rebel Audio plans to migrate Audio Up’s catalog onto the platform, including shows involving big names like Machine Gun Kelly, Anthony Anderson, Dennis Quaid, Jason Alexander, and Luke Wilson.

The broader team includes veterans from companies like MGM and DreamWorks, and even Mark Burnett has joined as an advisor. Burnett is the producer behind shows “Survivor,” “The Voice,” and “Shark Tank.”

Pricing-wise, the platform is structured in tiers, starting with a basic plan ($15/month) that offers AI-assisted production, hosting, and distribution to all major platforms, a Plus plan ($35/month), which includes video hosting, and voice cloning for ad reads, scaling up to a full Pro package ($70/month) that includes dynamic ad insertion, listener subscriptions, translation, and dubbing.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte says he’s not anti-AI. He can’t be.

“I run a frickin’ tech company,” he told the audience at the SXSW conference in Austin this week. Still, the founder of the creator platform has limits. Conte doesn’t think AI companies should be able to train their models on the work of creators without compensation, calling their decision to dub this “fair use” a “bogus” argument.

Conte’s SXSW talk positioned AI as another moment within the ongoing cycle of disruption that creators have been through many times before in the internet age. Like the transition from buying music on iTunes to streaming, or shifting video to the vertical format favored by TikTok, AI will likely break a lot of the models that creative people have worked hard to build over the years. Still, he believes they will thrive.

“I learned a very important thing as an artist, which is that change does not mean death. You can get back up, and you can fucking go again,” said Conte, who created Patreon to solve a problem he had faced as a musician: getting people to pay creators for their work.

Similarly, he doesn’t believe that AI companies should be able to scoop up creators’ content to train their models without some sort of compensation.

“The AI companies are claiming fair use, but this argument is bogus,” Conte said, reading from a printout of his speech, or rather, his manifesto. “It’s bogus because while they claim it’s fair to use the work of creators as training data, they do multimillion-dollar deals with rights holders and publishers like Disney and Condé Nast and Vox and Warner Music.”

If the AI companies’ argument around fair use was legal and sound, then they wouldn’t be paying these large rightsholders, he noted.

“If it’s legal to just use it, why pay?” he asked rhetorically. “Why pay them and not creators — not the millions of illustrators and musicians and writers — whose work has been consumed by these models to build hundreds of billions of dollars of value for these companies?”

Reading between the lines, it’s clear that Conte would like to tap into some of those payouts, too, for Patreon’s own community of creators. And he’s using Patreon’s scale as a creator community filled with hundreds of thousands of people to make that argument.

The founder also clarified that his decision to call out AI companies’ behavior is not because he’s anti-AI or anti-tech or even anti-change.

“I accept the inevitability of change, and I feel agency in discovering my next path through the chaos. A part of that challenge even excites me,” Conte said. “Still, the AI companies should pay creators for our work, not because the tech is bad — but because a lot of it is good, or it will be soon — and it’s going to be the future. And when we plan for humanity’s future, we should plan for society’s artists, too, not just for their sake, but for the sake of all of us. Societies that value and incentivize creativity are better for it,” he added.

The talk ended on a hopeful note, with Conte expressing his belief that humans will make and enjoy the work of other humans for a long time, despite whatever progress AI makes on this front.

“Great artists don’t play back what already exists,” Conte said, referencing large language models’ (LLMs) ability to predict the appropriate output. “They stand on the shoulders of giants. They push culture forward.”

It’s been almost exactly one year since Trevor Milton, the founder of now-bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola, was pardoned by President Trump. Now the Wall Street Journal has published one of the first deep dives into Milton’s new effort: trying to build autonomous planes.

Milton and an “investment group” purchased a downtrodden aviation company called SyberJet Aircraft late last year and he has spent the time since trying to turn the company around. That involves bringing in “dozens” of former Nikola staff, soliciting possible investors from Saudi Arabia, and spending a few hundred thousand dollars on lobbying, according to the report.

He reportedly wants to design an entirely new avionics system from the ground up that will help the company create the “first light jet to focus on artificial-intelligence flight,” which could open the door for defense contracts. But Milton, who was convicted of fraud in 2022, told the newspaper that he thinks planes will be “10 times harder than Nikola ever was.”