StoryFit Closes Venture Funding To Propel Its Predictive Ai Platform For Publishers & Studios
StoryFit is a rapid-growth technology company that provides predictive AI analytics for the publishing and entertainment industry.
Today, the company announced that it has raised $1.75 million in new funding.
Today, the company announced that it has raised $1.75 million in new funding. Livefyre).
Financing
Participating tech and media investors include Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI), Ascend Venture Capital, prominent Boston-area angel Walt Winshall, and continued investments from leading technology startup accelerators,
Company Growth and new hires
StoryFit’s plans to use the financing for key hires and further advancements in content-based analytics. These include predictive technology, audience identification, and industry trends. As an illustration of this, StoryFit recently expanded its senior team. In fact, the company recently added Rudy Prince as COO and promoted data scientist Mark Bessen to CTO.
Prince is an entrepreneurial public-company CEO with 30 years of experience. Prior to StoryFit, Prince served as a mentor, advisor, and executive to several Austin startups. He also served as founder/CEO of eFax.com in Silicon Valley. In that position, he led its IPO and tremendous growth in subscribers, leading to its acquisition by J2 Global.
Bessen, a data scientist and researcher on quantitative narrative analysis, came to StoryFit in 2017 from Apple. Previously, at Apple, he worked with the iBooks recommendations team. Armed with a BA in Literature from Stanford and data science studies at UC Berkeley, Bessen also provided data research support for The Bestseller Code (2016). His work at StoryFit focuses on leveraging cutting-edge machine learning technology to understand the core elements of stories that resonate across audiences.
Statements
StoryFit founder and CEO Monica Landers made the following statement:
The strategic and operational support we’ll receive from this stellar group of investors is as important as the funding. We look forward to benefiting from the breadth of media and publishing connections and experience that our investors can provide and we’re excited by both the new participants in this round as well as those that are returning.
StoryFit founder and CEO Monica Landers
Adam Plotkin, partner at ff Venture Capital also made a statement.
We have been incredibly impressed with StoryFit’s data science edge which was confirmed by a number of industry experts to be unmatched by any other company in the entertainment space. We believe StoryFit’s data-driven insights will revolutionize the way content decisions are made and marketed and we see tremendous growth potential in the company.
Adam Plotkin, partner at ff Venture Capital.
Keith Titan, Partner at BDMI also made a statement.
What attracted us to StoryFit is the way its NLP machine learning technology can be applied across a wide range of media properties. The rapidly developing capabilities of artificial intelligence combined with advanced NLP machine learning are opening up exciting opportunities to provide both creatives and marketers with new data-based tools to help them discover actionable insights for a variety of content—and StoryFit is at the cutting edge of media meets machine learning.
Keith Titan, Partner at BDMI.
About StoryFit:
StoryFit delivers a data-driven platform that is able to consistently inform decision making throughout a story’s lifecycle. This process begins with the acquisition and creative development and continues through production, greenlight, and marketing and distribution stages. To accomplish this, StoryFit uses artificial intelligence. In fact, they measure over 100,000 key features and compare to thousands of other books or scripts to generate actionable insights.
StoryFit combines a rich NLP and machine-learning expertise with a deep understanding of narrative content. As a result, StoryFit revolutionized the dataset provided to storytellers. This helps them to acquire the best content, identify the most effective story elements for audience engagement, track key development changes, and determine the appropriate audience.
StoryFit Founder Monica Landers
Monica Landers founded StoryFit. Monica has deep experience in media. Previously she produced for ABC News and Good Morning America. She also has executive leadership at multiple content companies, including Demand Media where she served as VP, Media Innovation. She also holds two media technology patents and is active in the Austin start-up community. Additionally, she serves as a mentor for Techstars and Comcast accelerators.
About ff Venture Capital
ff Venture Capital (ffVC) is a seed- and early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City. Founded in 2008, the firm invests, often as the lead investor, in growing technology and technology-enabled companies. They especially target companies with the potential to become high-value, market-moving businesses across emerging industries. For example, they have invested in the following industries: artificial intelligence, cyber security, drones, enterprise software, and FinTech.
ffVC devotes significant resources to mentoring emerging leaders to execute their business models and carefully manage capital resources. To accomplish this, they actively engage with founders to develop products, target markets, and accelerate growth.
About Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI)
Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. As a financially driven corporate venture investor, BDMI draws upon Bertelsmann’s global reach to provide not only capital, but also access to their network of businesses within Bertelsmann and across the media industry. BDMI has invested in over 50 startups since 2007. Currently, they focus on the categories of online video, ad tech, SaaS, content and e-commerce.
About Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann is a media, services and education company that operates in about 50 countries around the world. It includes the broadcaster RTL Group, the trade book publisher Penguin Random House, the magazine publisher Gruner + Jahr, the music company BMG, the service provider Arvato, the Bertelsmann Printing Group, the Bertelsmann Education Group and Bertelsmann Investments, an international network of funds. The company has 119,000 employees. In the 2017 financial year, Bertelsmann generated revenues of €17.2 billion. Bertelsmann stands for entrepreneurship and creativity. This combination promotes first-class media content and innovative service solutions that inspire customers around the world.
