Rivet, an artificial-intelligence-powered audience management platform, landed $500,000 in a pre-seed funding round this week led by Drive Capital, a venture firm that backs startups across the Midwest.
Founded by Anj Fayemi, Simran Pabla and Nafim Rahman, the customer relationship management platform helps artists and creators better identify and grow their fanbases.
Rivet started in Boston in 2021 while its founders were studying at MIT. It has since moved to Chicago’s West Loop in part because it hopes to follow the footsteps of successful local music tech and creator startups like Songfinch.
“This is hallowed ground in terms of companies that have done well in the creator space,” Fayemi told Chicago Inno. “Just surrounding ourselves in that ecosystem, it felt like a good place to continue to build the company.”
Rivet also will be closer to its main investor, Drive Capital, which is based in Columbus, Ohio.
Now with more than 1,400 active creators and musicians, including some who have built communities of as many as 8,000 fans, Rivet plans to launch its beta in the summer with a goal of getting to 20,000 active creators by the end of the year.
Typical Rivet users are mid-size artists, typically musicians, that have audiences of 10,000 to 400,000 people.
Rivet is the latest AI-powered platform to boast a successful funding round in recent months. In 2022 alone, investors bet at least $1.4 billion on generative-AI companies across 78 deals — almost as much as was invested in the previous five years combined, according to PitchBook data. That's further stands out in a year that saw deal values slump in most categories.
"I think it's hot because there are a lot of tasks that could be made more efficient and a lot of time could be saved on the human side that AI could essentially take away," Fayemi said. "For us in the creator space, what we're seeing is a lot of manual activities, like working in spreadsheets, are tasks that you shouldn't have to do as a creative person."
As next steps for Rivet, Fayemi is excited to continue to use the technology to streamline workflows for creators, and he eventually sees using generative models to create content on behalf of the creators based on fan preferences.
