Irish media platform lands investment from Go1 to expand the market for quality journalism

Media startup Noa (News Over Audio) has today announced a significant new partnership with global education platform Go1. The deal, in which Go1 has invested £179,000, will see Noa’s narrated articles become available to Go1's subscription base of over 3.5 million “learners” who are undertaking career education and training courses through what has become one of the world’s largest online learning and development platforms. 

Noa is a consumer subscription service producing and curating narrated versions of opinion, feature, and long-form articles across some of the world's leading publishers, reaching a primarily young global audience with 67% of its listeners under the age of 45.

Since its establishment in 2017, Noa has become the largest producer of spoken-word audio articles in the English-speaking world, having partnered with publishers such as Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and Bloomberg. With median listening time of 45 minutes per session, Noa’s objective is to help people understand and know more about important news topics. It achieves this by offering listeners access to multiple perspectives from a breadth of trusted news sources and curating only the most insightful articles on meaningful and important topics. 

Demand for Noa is strongest among 18-44 year old’s, who subscribe and listen through its mobile apps, website, and smart speaker skills. 

Go1 aggregates training from providers all over the world and offers over 150,000 different learning courses to its customers. Known as the “Spotify of corporate education”, Go1 has consistently grown year-on-year in its six-year existence, which accelerated when COVID-19 disrupted working practices and demanded new approaches to managing culture and skills within Go1’s global customer base of small, medium, and large companies, and government agencies. It was accepted in 2015 to the prestigious Y-Combinator accelerator, which triggered the worldwide expansion of the company with offices opening across the world including the United States, South Africa, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and Malaysia. Today Go1 enjoys the support of a large investor base including M12, the venture capital arm of Microsoft, Madrona Venture Group, Salesforce Ventures, and SEEK. It is among only a handful of Australian startups to reach unicorn status, with its most recent June 2021 valuation exceeding $1 billion.

According to the latest figures from Radiocentre, nationwide COVID-19 lockdowns have had a very positive effect on digital audio listenership across the UK, 34%of listeners of commercial stations are tuning in for an additional 1 hour and 53 minutes each da . Findings from a study conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, the number of daily news podcasts in the UK more than doubled between 2019 and 2020—from 8 to 18.This latest partnership aims to help Go1 learners stay on top of important news topics while undergoing training for their workplaces through its platform. A study from The American Psychological Association reveals that active listening has now become as valuable a cognitive process as reading. 

Commenting on the significance of the new partnership, CEO and Founder of Noa, Gareth Hickey, said: 

“We are delighted to have joined forces with one of the world’s largest learning platforms Go1 and look forward to helping change the way people consume important news as the world gradually reopens post-COVID. Both Noa and Go1 are aligned in our thinking about quality journalism. We see journalism as an important source of knowledge and learning for those looking to progress their careers. What I admire most about the Go1 team is their deep passion for learning, which is a passion the team at Noa shares. By joining forces, we're accelerating Noa's growth by reaching a targeted audience of learners who can now complement their Go1 courses with premium audio-journalism from the world's best publishers.”

Speaking about Go1’s new partnership with Noa, Andrew Barnes, Co-founder and CEO of Go1, said: 

“Noa has a very unique offering and partnering with them will increase Go1’s differentiation by allowing us to provide new ways for our learners to access premium journalism, in audio. We believe it will enable more Go1 learners to become commercially and globally aware while they're busy and on-the-move. We have a passion to drive and improve the learning ecosystem and our investment is part of a broader plan to help accelerate the growth of organisations with a similar ethos such as Noa.”