Fulgur Ventures partners with Fountain because podcasting is one of the few mass-market mediums where the economics are ready to be rewritten, and Fountain is the team rewriting them. Founded in 2021 in London by Nick Malster and Oscar Merry, Fountain is a Podcasting 2.0 client that turns listening into a native bitcoin experience, with sats flowing in both directions between audiences and creators over the Lightning Network.

The product is a full-featured podcast app where listeners discover shows, follow creators, and engage through comments and clips, while a Lightning wallet runs quietly in the background. Listeners can earn sats for their attention and stream them, second by second, to the podcasts they love. Boosts and boostagrams allow audiences to attach micropayments and messages directly to specific moments in an episode, creating a feedback loop the open podcast ecosystem has never had.

This is deeply aligned with the Fulgur thesis. We back companies that use Lightning to repair broken creator economies rather than build new walled gardens. Podcasting is open by design, but its monetisation has been captured by ad networks and exclusive deals. Fountain plugs Bitcoin payments into the existing RSS-based podcast graph, which means creators keep their audiences, their feeds, and now finally a meaningful share of the value they generate.

The bigger picture is the rise of value-for-value media. As listeners experience streaming sats and direct creator support, expectations shift across the wider audio and creator landscape. Fountain is best positioned to ride that shift, with a sticky listener product, a growing creator base, and a clear lead among Podcasting 2.0 clients.

Investing in Nick, Oscar, and the Fountain team is a bet that the future of podcasting is open, Lightning-powered, and creator-aligned. We are proud to partner with them as they build it.