Fave raises 2.2 million dollars

Founder Jacquelle Amankonah Horton has raised 2.2 million dollars in seed funding for her start-up Fave, which is based in Dietikon in the canton of Zurich. Venture capital companies such as the Female Founders Fund as well as leading players within the music industry including Sony Music, Warner Music and Concord Music have all opted to invest in the new social media platform for superfans. Moreover, the start-up, which was only entered in the Swiss commercial register in May, has also agreed a strategic innovation partnership with Universal Music.

Fave aims to offer added value to passionate fans of creatives that goes way beyond a like on Twitter or comment beneath an Instagram post. Fave aspires to bring like-minded people together, create space for creative fan content in addition to recognizing and rewarding engagement, according to an article published by startupticker.ch. Furthermore, those interested have the opportunity to buy exclusive items via a marketplace operated by the fans for the fans. A beta test involving 500 fans of the singer Taylor Swift is already in progress, with another six “fandoms” to be created with the aim of going live before the end of the summer. Fave banks 10 percent of all transaction fees from both fans and the creatives themselves, the US online magazine TechCrunch states.

This fresh capital injection will now allow Fave to accelerate business and software development processes to integrate additional functionalities in the app. Moreover, the team – which currently comprises four employees in Switzerland and the USA – is also to be expanded. As Horton announced on her LinkedIn profile, she is currently looking to appoint somebody to the role of Head of Engineering in Switzerland.

In the past, Horton worked for Google for seven years, five of which were spent with YouTube. Prior to this, she launched award-winning music and entertainment apps for Viacom as well as innovating music distribution processes at UMG. Horton was also aged only 20 when she received her Master’s degree from the University of Southern California (USC). Since then, she has been named as one of the “Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs in the World” and “Top 50 Women Product Managers in Europe”, while in 2020 Horton made the esteemed “Forbes 30 Under 30” list. In the same year, Fave emerged victorious in the “Start-up of the Year” category at the Music Tectonics conference.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Horton explained her motivation behind setting up Fave: “I was the girl in her bedroom who knew every lyric of every song, how many freckles they have, and fell asleep to the movie every single night just to hear the sound of his voice”. Now, the hope is that Fave will “give fans a place where they can truly let their fan flag fly”, Horton says.