These are the things that digital creatives' dreams are made of.
Peter Agelasto developed the software that would become Starchive while working in partnership with the Bob Dylan Music Company. The team handling Dylan’s musical legacy were finding complications in accessing the different file types that they had in their collection in an efficient and functional way.
From this problem, Agelasto developed a platform that organizes and saves media files with an AI-generated tagging system, allowing the team to see an overview of the files available to them by practically any categorization they could need and get perspective on what assets could be capitalized on. The software allows all file types to exist in a single system with a flexible data schema where relationships can be built based on where they share similar data, like the location a photo or video was taken at, the date, subject matter, etc., allowing for easier searching when working on specific projects or acquiring assets for new licensing deals.
"We make it very easy for you to curate your personal digital media."
Agelasto deployed the software in 2013 and a year later approached Richard Averitt about helping him make a company out of the product. A former commercial photographer, Averitt understood the challenges associated with digital asset management and came on board after realizing the software’s potential.
"When he showed me what he had done, I instantly recognized the power of it,” Averitt said. “I had never seen anything like it before.”
Today, Starchive is used by a long list of companies representing the media rights of celebrity icons, including Billy Joel, Carly Simon and John Wayne, to name a few. Starchive’s clients have also expanded to institutions such as the New York Philharmonic and New York Public Radio.
Additionally, Starchive has become the digital asset management tool in use by Essence Magazine, where they focused their energy on a service-focused business model. The company’s largest project to date was transferring the magazine’s 400 terabytes of media assets out of Time Warner and on to the Starchive platform.
Starchive more recently began evaluating opportunities for growth, and identified a space within the digital asset management of smaller scale clients, particularly individuals that include freelancers, vloggers and small businesses. Individual memberships start at $5.50 a month and include essentially the same functionality as the platform used for larger clients, but on a smaller scale.
"We make it very easy for you to curate your personal digital media,” Averitt said. “Find the things you want, understand their relationships, make something new with it.”
Averitt says the newly restructured SaaS product has the potential to take up a space that has previously been held by Dropbox, although he says that there is no real competitor in the marketplace that does exactly what they do in terms of their archiving system, which features auto-tagging files with AI and building meta-data between assets.
Originating from Nellysford, the Starchive team in its current form is made of seven people and is now based in Charlottesville. They downsized after moving away from Richmond and shifting their focus away from a sales-targeted service business model to focus more on developing a scalable platform.
Starchive has completed three rounds of fundraising, which resulted in just under $5 million. The funding came from early local angel investors and then additional seed investors, one of which was local firm Trolley Investors. The last round was raised from The Felton Group, a private family office. While the company is not fully self-sustaining off the revenue generated through online subscriptions, they hope to be by next summer.
“When people find us, it’s because they are looking to solve a problem, such as ‘alternatives to Dropbox,’ or ‘how to better organize my digital assets’,” Averitt said. “There’s an entirely new opportunity in the marketplace that hasn’t existed before for a platform with some of the powers of a digital asset management system, but that is more user friendly without a long learning curve. That's what we've built. Once we get our first 10,000 customers, we are going to spread like wildfire.”
