Boston startup ASMBLE has publicly launched its new community platform designed to connect brands and influencers.
The company said it’s been beta-testing the product for a year, with 2,000 influencers and a “range of brands” in the U.S. It says it's now ready to go global.
The way ASMBLE (pronounced "assemble") works is that brands purchase a seat in order to create one or more “micro-communities,” to which they invite influencers, creators, “superfans” or existing customers. They can then launch conversations, contests, focus groups, events and influencer marketing projects from within the communities.
Founded in 2019, it recently changed its name from Greenlight Media.
The premise, said co-founder Nadeem Mazen, a former Cambridge City Councilor and MIT alumnus, is that there are pain points to solve in the creator economy on both sides of the equation.
“Marketplaces are lackluster, brands are skeptical, influencers get squeezed, and new creator business models fail to capture enough influencer buy-in to really scale,” Mazen said, calling what influencers and creators do “one of the highest pressure jobs.”
The company’s ambition is to become the “Y-combinator for creators,” he said.
Since leaving the Cambridge City Council, Mazen has founded Impactive, a text-messaging app for political campaigns, a creative agency called Nimblebot, and a company building political infrastructure for Muslims.
ASMBLE Cofounder Ace Moghimi held an executive role at Manulife and founded a company building tools to make social media safe and fair for users.
James Moffet, who worked at Impactive with Mazen and also as a technology consultant for the cities of Cambridge and Boston, is also on board as chief technology officer.
