Investor Day 04: Niche

Hello 👋

Welcome to another edition of Investor Day, where we share the best startup companies that are still in the early stages of their journey and/or are fundraising!

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Thank you!Kenneth (@ksal___)

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🦄 This week we’re most excited about:

Niche

HQ: Los Angeles, CA

Niche is an ecosystem for decentralized social networks.

Niche is for:

• Content creators who want direct distribution to their most engaged fans

• Collectors who want to buy and sell with ease

• Hobbyist groups who want a digital home for their real-world communities

😟 Problem

Current social media platforms profit from selling you ads. They harvest your data to create targeted ads that are more likely to apply to you and make them more money. This leads to poor content, easy propagation of misinformation, and a loss of privacy. One of the more challenging outcomes is the impact social media has on mental health; the platforms intentionally keep users hooked on their phones to see more ads.

🤩 Solution

Niche is solving this product addiction by removing ads altogether. In fact, here’s a notable distinction: social media has users, and Niche has owner-members.

Niche is reinventing social media by distributing ownership of your networks to its members. Rather than traditional social media that uses your content to sell targeted ads, Niche clubs reward engagement and content creation with token ownership. Each club has its own unique tokens that accrue real value over time and can be used for commerce, event admission, and membership status. The token can be exchanged for real currency. That means your networks are now part of your net worth. Niche fulfills the web3 promise of decentralized ownership and reinvents social media along with it.

👥 Founder(s) background: The company has an impressive team, co-founded by Christopher Gulczynski, CEO, and Zaven Nahapetyan, CTO. Chris is the co-founder, CCO, and patented co-inventor of “the swipe” feature for Tinder and co-creator and CPO of Bumble. Zaven was a senior engineering manager at Facebook, who created and led many significant projects like Facebook fundraisers and initiatives promoting election engagement and fighting misinformation.

📈 Market: Today, there are roughly 3.8 billion social media users, and with the proliferation of cheaper mobile devices worldwide, the number of users expands yearly. Data ownership, complaints over fragmented followings, censorship, and closed source algorithms offer a chance for Decentralized Social media (DeSoc) to usurp market share.1

💸 Raised $$ / backed by: $1.8 million pre-seed / MetaWeb, Alumni Ventures & NEAR Foundation (Grant)

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If you are a new reader, check out the amazing startups that have been featured in the past!

→ Investor Day 03

Thank you for reading this far and, as always, if you ever have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.Kenneth (@ksal___)