Google’s AI note-taking and research assistantNotebookLMtook off to a spectacular reception at launch, capturing people’s imaginations with its ability to quickly whip up summaries and reports, and turn reams of documents into “podcasts” with AI hosts discussing the topic to help users in their research.
Inspired by the success of the project, three devs who worked on NotebookLM since its inception are now building an audio-first app calledHuxe, which can similarly help users dive deep into topics by generating a “podcast” with multiple AI hosts. The startup said on Tuesday that it had raised $4.6 million in funding from Conviction, Genius Ventures, Figma CEO Dylan Field, and Google Research’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean.
The app launched on an invite-only basis in June, and is now available to everyone oniOSandAndroid.
Raiza Martin, along with Jason Spielman and Stephen Hughes, left Google in December 2024 to explore their own ideas. They initially launched a chatbot slanted towards more B2B use cases, but decided to focus on the consumer market and built a personal assistant in March 2025 that could generate personalized images, videos, and audio.
“During this phase, we realized that people liked having the ability to generate audio for different topics. We also observed that people often used the app at specific times to get their daily brief or catch up with news while getting ready,” Martin told TechCrunch.
That insight led the three to lean into audio and buildHuxe.
Huxe essentially gives you a daily briefing based on the emails you receive and by connecting to your calendars to understand your schedule. It also lets you explore topics, and like NotebookLM, it will generate a podcast with AI hosts discussing the topic. You can interact with the AI hosts at any point in time, ask questions about the topic, or request them to explain points in a different way.
What’s different here is that Huxe lets users build a “live station” of any topic, like tech news, sports, or even celebrity gossip. After you listen to a station, the app will give you updates by tapping different sources — helpful for following developing news. There’s also a personalized interest feed, which automatically generates audio content that might interest you.
Martin said that during the early NotebookLM days, a cohort of power users drove the product feedback, and Huxe is seeing similar signs.
Source: Techcrunch
