Starchive, a digital asset management platform for creators, raises $4 million in a seed funding round led by the Felton Group.
Starchive currently supports a world-class roster of artists and archives who use its product as the center of their digital operations, from storage to distribution.
The Starchive’s digital asset management platform is trusted by iconic creators including Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Leonard Cohen, New Orleans Jazz Fest, Essence Magazine, The Property Brothers and tens of thousands of individual creators on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Today, the company’s platform has over 15 million individual digital assets under management.
Now, with a platform integrating blockchain solutions for NFTs and Web3, Starchive is redefining digital asset ownership for tomorrow’s creator economy. As a bridge from Web2 to the Web3 economy, Starchive supports a community of cutting-edge creators who are composing, sharing, and remixing content for monetization across Web3 marketplaces, Web3 domains and the metaverse.
Founded in 2015, as an alternative to traditional digital asset management (DAM) solutions, Starchive was built to help the Bob Dylan Music Company better curate and leverage its content for new projects including Box Sets, the Bootleg Series, documentary films and, more recently, NFTs.
For four years, Starchive’s founding team of creators-and-technologists iterated the platform in response to the needs of dozens of iconic clients.
Co-Founder and CEO, Richard Averitt, said:
“In 2019, we began to harness the accumulated wisdom of working with the world’s biggest artists and archives to build the next generation of Starchive for the entire creative economy, enabling creators to not only store their assets on our platform, but also begin to mint and manage their on-chain and off-chain assets in a single environment.”
Well before the covid-19 pandemic and the recent surge of interest in NFT marketplaces, Starchive began catering aggressively to the long tail of creators. This shift to a self-service SaaS opened the floodgates for digital natives, many of whom thrive on TikTok and Twitch, hungry for a solution to take back control of their digital property, privacy, and their power to make money.
“It is exhilarating to be a leader at the beginning of the tech and creative revolution, that will disintermediate the internet and give creators control of what they make, how it is shared and the money they generate. Starchive subscriptions have surged more than 200x this year.”
Starchive’s seed round was led by The Felton Group, LLC, the family office of hedge fund manager, Jaffray Woodriff, who founded Quantitative Investment Management (QIM) in 2003. Today, The Felton Group, LLC operates as an early-stage VC in the Mid-Atlantic and has invested in dozens of consumer and enterprise digital companies.
Starchive’s vision has also attracted a compelling list of active advisors including Rishi Jaitly, the Founding CEO of Times Bridge and a former Google, Knight Foundation and Twitter Vice President; Shailesh Rao, investor/advisor to several Unicorns around the world after being a senior executive at both Google and Twitter and a Partner at TPG. Starchive’s investors include notables like Lexa Pope, who joined Google as employee #152 to build from scratch the team responsible for taking AdWords to market, and who later did the same for Facebook.
The creator market is estimated to be worth more than $104.2 billion and continually growing. Starchive envisions a world where all creators have ownership of their past, present and future digital assets.
The company has raised $5.7 million total funding to date. Starchive said that it was gearing up for a Series A round in early 2022, to accelerate its lead in this explosive and exciting sector.
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