Andrew Mason is best known for founding Groupon, which went from idea to $16B IPO in just two years before a dramatic fall from grace that ended with Mason being fired as CEO. After Groupon, he founded Detour, an audio tour app that was acquired by Bose in 2018. But it was during Detour that Mason stumbled on his next big idea.

From Internal Tool to Product

While building Detour, Mason's team realized that existing audio production tools — designed for music — were terrible for editing spoken word. The insight was simple but powerful: if you could automatically transcribe audio, you could edit audio by editing text, like a word processor. Mason saw that speech recognition technology was reaching a tipping point that made this viable, and spun Descript out as its own company in 2017 with a $5M seed from Andreessen Horowitz.

The Lyrebird Acquisition

The pivotal move came in 2019 when Descript acquired Lyrebird, a Montreal-based AI voice cloning startup founded by PhD students under Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio. This became "Overdub" — the ability to literally type new words and have them spoken in your own cloned voice. Combined with automatic filler word removal, studio-quality sound enhancement, and text-based editing, Descript became the go-to tool for podcasters.

Rebuilding Everything

By 2020, they expanded into video editing with the same text-first philosophy. In November 2022, Mason unveiled a completely rebuilt Descript alongside a $50M Series C led by OpenAI Startup Fund — signaling that AI-native editing was the future. The product now serves podcasters, YouTubers, TikTok creators, and business teams.

• Founded: 2017
• Seed round: $5M (Andreessen Horowitz)
• Lyrebird acquisition: 2019
• Video editing launch: 2020
• Series C: $50M (OpenAI Startup Fund, November 2022)
• ARR: ~$55M (late 2024, 75% YoY growth)
• Valuation: $550M