Cornish startup xigxag opens £250,000 funding round

Audio visual reading app xigxag has opened a £250,000 public funding round on the crowdfunding platform Seedrs with over 72% already raised.

Xigxag, available on Google Play and the App Store, is the first app to offer customers audiobooks and ebooks in a single format called the x-book, which indexes human-voiced narration to the corresponding text so users can listen and read simultaneously, or listen on the go and switch to reading at home.

Xigxag users have access to a growing list of titles from established publishers such as HarperCollins, Hachette and Penguin Random House in addition to self-published authors and independent publishers including Faber, Canelo, Boldwood and Chelsea Green.

For publishers, xigxag offers simple, per-title payments, as a way of making sure authors and publishers are both paid fairly.

This is the second fundraising bid from xigxag since 2019, when it was founded by Mark Chaplin and Kelli Fairbrother, who recently announced that the app had hit 9000 users and was shortlisted as the Futurebook Start-Up of the Year.

“I am hugely optimistic about the potential of audio to transform publishing” says Kelli Fairbrother, current CEO of xigxag. “We co-founded xigxag because we felt totally underserved as consumers. Any time a market is not being served well, it creates an opportunity for someone else to do it better. We believe innovation in channel, messaging and especially format has the potential to attract new audiences to books.”