Today, we are pleased to announce that we are adding Rival to the #Angels portfolio, which now has more than 60 companies. Rival is a commerce, data and security platform for live events. We’ve known Rival’s founder, Nathan Hubbard, from our time building Twitter together. At Twitter, we saw the power of bringing humans together for live experiences in the digital world. We are excited to see an innovative, experienced founder like Nathan build a team tackle this problem in the physical world.
The live event experience is broken for each constituent of the experience — fans, teams, artists and venues. The secondary ticketing market takes advantage of teams and artists who cannot price to account for supply and demand, therefore transferring many billions of dollars to bots and scammers. In addition, there’s no identity solution for live events — which is a missed opportunity for team and artists who want to connect more deeply with their fans. This also creates a huge potential security risk in a time where risks such as mass shootings, bombs and other attacks are on the rise.
Nathan’s experience as the CEO of Ticketmaster as well as VP of Commerce and Media at Twitter was a perfect blend of expertise, thoughtfulness and industry network. We knew that he had spent the past decade listening to teams, artists, fans and venues vocalizing the problems that existed with legacy systems. We also felt that technological timing was key — Cloud, Mobility, Facial Recognition, AR/VR help to bring Rival to life.
We also felt confident that Nathan — in conjunction with his co-founder and CTO Ryan Lissack — would be able to recruit an amazing team in LA to go build a solution from the ground up. Lastly, we respect Nathan and Ryan’s commitment to building a diverse team and diverse cap table from the beginning.
April Underwood (Willie Nelson), Jana Messerschmidt (Snoop Dogg), and Katie Stanton (Beyonce) came together from #Angels to invest in Rival, despite their musical differences.
You can learn more about Rival here or from Nathan’s Tweetstorm. The team is based in LA and hiring.
