Participated · Series B · Jun 2018

Influential builds social intelligence and activation tools that leverage AI (it is a developer partner with IBM Watson) to help brands and marketers find and activate influencers. Its Talent Pro product gives agencies like WME access to social data on a broader pool of talent, enabling deals that surround A-list celebrities with lookalike influencers. The company also offers a social intelligence product for competitive and audience insights and is working to map paid influencer posts to real-world consumer actions. Influential announced a $12 million Series B that included WME and existing investors Capital Zed, ECA Ventures, Paradigm Talent Agency, ROAR and Tech Coast Angels. With this round the company has now raised a total of $26.5 million. CEO Ryan Detert positions influencer marketing as one tactic within a broader social intelligence and activation offering aimed at both agencies and brands. Influential is a technology platform and social media influencer network powered by the cognitive computing capabilities of IBM Watson. The platform works with more than 7,000 top influencers across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine and YouTube, representing more than 4.4 billion followers. Influencers are activated via a patent-pending app to run brand campaigns and create targeted conversations using age, gender, interests, ethnicity and more than 60,000 data points. The company plans to use the $5M Series A to ramp up hires and allocate resources toward developers, data scientists and data partners. The round was led by Capital Zed and included participation from Roar, Paradigm Talent Agency, Europlay Capital Advisors, MSMCi, Ace Fund and several angel investors. Influential operates from Beverly Hills, New York City and Las Vegas and is led by CEO and Co-Founder Ryan Detert; it has raised $9M to date. Influential operates a mobile-first marketplace that non-exclusively represents roughly 1,000 online influencers and connects them with about 25 brands or agencies. Brands post offers with messaging, legal requirements, and deliverable parameters; Influential selects 20–100 influencers to respond and collects submissions via APIs. The company bills itself as “100 percent brand-safe” because brands directly convey requirements and receive final submissions. Influential enforces a minimum brand spend of $50,000 for engagements and compares its model to competitors that act more like agencies or use different pricing approaches. CEO and cofounder Ryan Detert and cofounder/COO Dan Steele built the platform from Detert’s own influencer background. The new funding will be used for further platform development and sales efforts, and the company is undertaking a new round on FlashFunders.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2014

Splice operates a popular, collaboration-focused platform—often described as a GitHub for music producers—that lets creators save, share, collaborate and remix music. The service is AI-infused and in November 2019 the company unveiled an AI product that helps producers match samples across genres. Splice has grown to roughly 4 million users and has expanded its technology through acquisitions of Audiaire and Superpowered. The company says it continues to invest in new tech to make producers’ lives easier and to keep people inspired to create. Splice faces competition from entrants such as Native Instruments' Sounds.com and Arcade by Output. Founder and CEO Steve Martocci, who previously sold GroupMe to Skype, leads the company. Splice operates a subscription-based audio sample marketplace and collaboration suite for music producers, offering unlimited access to a library of roughly 3 million sounds for $7.99 per month. The company pools subscription revenue and pays creators based on downloads, and has paid out $15 million to artists since 2013, with that total doubling in the last year. Its product set includes version-control-style collaboration tools and rent-to-own software synthesizers to make production tools more accessible. Splice reports 2.5 million users, up from 1.5 million a year earlier, and faces competition from entrants like Native Instruments’ Sounds.com. Leadership hires (including a new CPO, CFO, and CHRO) are intended to help prioritize product lines and scale the business. Management says future plans focus on scaling, building new products, diversifying content, and working with bigger artists. Splice operates a Sounds marketplace where musicians pay $7.99/month to download up to 100 royalty-free samples, and it compensates creators based on download frequency (having paid out over $7M so far). The company also offers Splice Studio, a cloud-synced version-control tool that backs up work-in-progress after every edit and enables safer collaboration across GarageBand, Logic and Ableton. It provides rent-to-own access to plugins and instruments so artists can pause and resume payments, a model designed to be cheaper than piracy and traditional purchases. Splice reports 1.5 million users and has a team of about 100 staffers, with product and creative teams in New York and a new squad being built in Los Angeles. The company is developing Creative Companion, a songwriting assistant that uses machine learning to suggest next steps and surface fitting samples. Leadership hires mentioned in the article include former Facebook product manager Matt Pakes as VP of product and former Secret co-founder Chrys Bader to lead the LA team. Splice provides cloud storage and collaboration tools for music producers, automatically saving and syncing every change and enabling collaborators to annotate and share in-progress tracks. It supports creation suites Ableton, Logic, and FL Studio and debuts a DNA Player that visualizes separate tracks, allows mute/solo, and supports timed comments. After ten months in private beta, Splice launched a public beta to widen its network of artists and gather feedback. Founder Steve Martocci has signed top DJs and managers as users and investors to help evangelize the product. The company plans to integrate more creation tools by the end of the year and eventually charge a subscription fee, though the service is free during beta. The round announced also highlights the strategic involvement of DJs, managers, and agencies to drive adoption among professional artists. Splice provides a client that auto-saves music projects and dependent sample files to the cloud, creating a timeline of saves that lets artists revert to prior versions and see who changed which tracks. The product initially integrates with Ableton, with planned support for Logic, Pro Tools, Reason, and more. Collaboration is handled by granting email-based access to projects so teammates can access all saves, view timeline updates, and add comments. Splice also offers a DNA Player that exports standard music files, visualizes underlying tracks, allows fan comments, and can make tracks publicly remixable. The company launched a private beta and is positioning itself as a simple, musician-friendly alternative to ad hoc file-sharing workflows. Founders Steve Martocci and Matt Aimonetti built the product to preserve existing music-creation workflows while removing the friction around saving, sharing, and collaborating. Financially, Splice announced a $2.75 million seed round to fund development and growth. The team plans a premium model and sees additional revenue potential by helping artists monetize distribution and early-access experiences for fans.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2012

Laffster is a Venice, CA–based startup that provides a comedic discovery and personalization platform for online videos, articles and other humorous content. The company has launched Mock the Vote, a free iPhone app delivering humorous up-to-the-minute takes on political news with content and curation from partners like the POLIPOP! Network at Maker Studios and The New Yorker’s Cartoon Editor, plus satirical sources such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and The Onion. It collaborates with humor-focused researchers at Dartmouth and UC Boulder and humor writers at publications including The New Yorker. Co-founded by CEO Dan Altmann, CTO Geoff Plitt and CPO Eric Posen, Laffster is a graduate of MuckerLab. The company raised $750K in seed funding and plans to use the capital to build future apps and develop technology to accelerate discovery and optimize content with partners on third-party platforms. Laffster is hiring as it scales product and partner integrations.