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Superjoi Raises $2.5 Million To Help Fans Fund Their Favorite Creators
Christian Hetrick
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Fintech startup Superjoi, which lets fans fund creators’ content projects, has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding.
Superjoi raised the funding from fintech-focused investors including Ascension Ventures, QED Investors, Systema VC, Tomahawk and Modern Venture Partners. The round also included participation from senior leadership at e-commerce platform Shopify, fintech firm Revolut and Los Angeles-based live-in accelerator Launch House.
Based in West Hollywood, Superjoi’s platform allows creators to run Kickstarter-like campaigns to raise capital for projects, while giving fans the chance to suggest ideas for new content. Creators can also reward fans who chip in by giving them event tickets, merchandise or a personal video call. Later this year, Superjoi plans to help fans reap financial rewards, too—such as a share of advertising revenues generated from projects that they backed.
A screenshot from Superjoi's platform.
Major online platforms like Facebook and YouTube have increasingly monetized the relationship between creators and fans, targeting users with ads and sharing some of the revenues with creators. But Superjoi’s founders contend that fans have been completely cut out of the equation despite driving creators’ successes. In September, the startup began building a platform that would give fans a share of the financial upside, co-founder and CEO Chris Knight told dot.LA.
“Superjoi, as we position it, is liquidity with love,” Knight said. “The reason why we call it that is, for somebody who's creative, there's no better funding source for their creativity than the people who love them—and that’s their fans.”
Knight learned a lot about what he calls “superfans” after helping to build Fantom, a fan-focused smartwatch launched with England’s Manchester City Football Club. The Premier League team consults its fans on decisions relating to its stadium and sponsorships, he noted. “I see huge opportunities in the future for creators to actually have a deeper engagement with their audience and actually mobilize their audience to a new level,” Knight said.
From left: Superjoi co-founders Chris Knight, Piotr Wolanski and Soren Creutzburg
Courtesy of Superjoi
Fans will initially fund projects on Superjoi by buying “supercoins,” an in-platform currency that is worth $1 each. While supercoins are not technically crypto tokens at this stage, the startup envisions letting fans invest in creators, earn a financial return and receive ownership in their content based on tokenization. Superjoi collects a 10% cut of a creator’s fundraising goal.
The platform plans to launch in mid-May with about 25 U.S.-based creators with larger audiences, and will onboard more creators on a waitlisted basis, Knight said. A full public launch is expected later this summer.
Superjoi, which has 14 employees, plans to use the new funds on growing its team, acquiring creators and marketing the platform.
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Christian Hetrick
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Proptech Startup Snappt Raises $100 Million To Help Landlords Flag Fraudulent Rental Applications
05:00 AM | March 15, 2022
Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash
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Snappt, a West Hollywood-based proptech startup that helps landlords detect fraudulent rental application documents, has landed a $100 million Series A funding round led by venture capital giant Insight Partners, it announced Tuesday.
The startup is the part of an expanding real estate tech sector that raised a record $9.5 billion in funding last year to produce products ranging from retail analytics to energy efficiency technology to tenant management platforms.
Snappt, in particular, addresses the problem of financial document fraud by rental applicants, by providing landlords with a software platform that can detect when pay stubs and bank statements have been fraudulently altered. More than just a surface-level scan, the software analyzes the source code behind the documents to make sure it matches that of legitimate forms by banks and financial institutions. The startup claims its technology has a 99.8% accuracy rate, while roughly 12% of the forms it processes are flagged as fraudulent.
Snappt co-founder and CEO Daniel Berlind
Courtesy of Snappt
“Financial institutions’ documents come in incredibly consistently,” Snappt co-founder and CEO Daniel Berlind told dot.LA. “A Bank of America statement will always come in with the exact same properties. And if you're going to move these properties around, there’s obvious evidence of that.”
Berlind and fellow Snappt co-founder Noah Goldman experienced such issues firsthand; their families both run property management businesses based in Los Angeles, and the pair would often consult with one another on problems they were having with tenants. In 2017, they noticed a surge of fraudulent bank statements and pay stubs; the numbers wouldn’t add up, or the format of various forms submitted from the same bank were inconsistent.
The pair founded Snappt that year and quickly gained traction with the platform, which is used at over 1,000 multifamily properties across the U.S. While real estate is still their target audience for the software, Berlind said other potential use cases could include mortgages, auto loans, utility bills and health care documents (such as forged COVID-19 vaccine cards).
“At the core of what we've built is a fraud detection engine,” Berlind said. “It’s more about how we tune it and the information that we have available.”
In a statement, Insight Partners managing director Thomas Krane said Snappt “is revolutionizing the rental screening process” by addressing “the biggest challenge for today’s property manager—lowering eviction rates and thus reducing bad debt.” Snappt claims its platform helped customers avoid more than $105 million in bad debt last year.
The startup’s previous investors include New York-based early-stage venture firm Inertia Ventures, which provided it with $1.5 million in seed funding, according to Snappt. The company did not provide its current valuation.
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Keerthi Vedantam
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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keerthi@dot.la
LA Fintech Dave Goes Public on the Nasdaq After Sealing SPAC Deal
12:21 PM | January 06, 2022
Neo-bank Dave makes it debut on the Nasdaq with a billboard.
West Hollywood-based banking app Dave made its much-hyped debut as a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday.
Shares in Dave (ticker: DAVE) opened trading at $8.27, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $3 billion. After swooning close to $7 per share, Dave’s stock rebounded above the $9 mark before closing the day at $8.53.
The fintech startup, which is notably backed by famed billionaire investor Mark Cuban, wrapped up its merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Chicago-based investment firm Victory Park Capital on Wednesday. The company is expected to raise up to $465 million in capital as a result of the merger, and is looking to use the proceeds to further grow its business—including a potential foray into crypto.
Dave founder and CEO Jason Wilk told dot.LA that part of the reason the company decided to go public was because he had personally grown weary of “the distraction of having to raise private capital.”
“We had a lot of interest in the private market, but we really thought to go public—and give the everyday retail investor the chance to invest in the company and grow with us—was a really good opportunity,” he said. “It makes it easier for us to raise more capital as a public company. Of course, there are some headaches of being a public business, but access to capital is far easier.”
Dave is among a wave of fintech startups aiming to disrupt the retail banking sector with low-fee, digitally-enabled banking services. The firm launched in 2017 as a financial planning app to help customers avoid the billions of dollars in overdraft fees charged annually by traditional banks.
It has since grown its offerings to include a checking account, and now has 11 million customers who use its services for banking, overdraft protection, building credit and finding side-gigs. Dave estimates that it has helped customers avoid nearly $1 billion in overdraft fees to date through its flagship feature, ExtraCash, and earn over $200 million in income through its gig-economy job board, Side Hustle.
As part of the IPO, Wilk and several other Dave executives rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell on Thursday—though the ceremony actually took place in L.A. several days ago, and not in New York City on the day of the company’s market debut.
Because of COVID-19 protocols and social distancing restrictions, the stock exchange shipped a duplicate podium to Dave’s old offices in the Mid-Wilshire district. The podium arrived from San Francisco, where it is occasionally used for bell-ringing ceremonies involving Silicon Valley tech firms.
Though Dave moved its headquarters in October to the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, Wilk and the other executives pre-recorded the opening bell ceremony in their old digs on Tuesday. “It was really cool to ring the bell in the place where we used to pump out code with just a few of us sitting around a desk or a coffee table,” Wilk said.
Dave is not the only L.A.-based neo-bank that has looked to go public via a SPAC merger. Marina del Rey-based Aspiration, which offers banking services with an environmentally-conscious angle, is pursuing a similar route and aims to make its market debut by the end of March.
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Pat Maio
Pat Maio has held various reporting and editorial management positions over the past 25 years, having specialized in business and government reporting. He has held reporting jobs with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Dow Jones News and other newspapers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
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