- Catch+Release is a startup that licenses user-generated content for brands to use in ads.
- The company just announced an additional $8.8 million in Series A funding.
- Here’s the deck the company used to pitch investors.
Catch+Release, a startup that licenses user-generated content from creators and sells it to brands, announced in early August an additional $8.8 million in Series A funding led by return investor Accel. This brings the total funding the company raised to over $31 million.
Other return investors included Cervin, Astia Fund, and Stagwell, with new investors HarbourVest Partners, tech founder and CEO Nick Mehta, and Rich Kleiman and Kevin Durant’s fund 35V.
“We just raised this round in an incredibly difficult environment, with lots of market insecurity and many ups and downs,” Analisa Goodin, founder and CEO of the company, told Insider. “We met over 100 investors over a 6-month timeframe. We were fortunate to have our existing investors contribute to this round and they continue to be very supportive and believe in our mission.”
Goodin founded the company in 2016 after she experienced firsthand pain while working at an ad agency to source and license content for brand customers. The two options she saw at the time were stock content or costly original production. Catch+Release aims to provide a “third way,” Goodin said: licensing existing content from the internet.
Creators who are interested in licensing their content — not just influencers but also filmmakers, photographers, artists, musicians, and regular social-media users — can sign up for the platform and upload the content they want to put up for licensing or sync their social-media accounts, for free. They are then paid a fee that varies depending on factors like how long a brand will use the content for, and for which advertising channels.
Brands can browse the platform’s library of content that is available for licensing, or if they find content online they’d like to use for advertising, the company can handle the licensing process for them. The company also offers “curation packs” to help brands find different types of content depending on their needs.
Catch+Release has worked with brands like Ford, Delta, Walmart, Samsonite, and Nike, among others.
The fresh $8.8 million investment will go toward improving the platform’s marketplace, the software that brands and agencies can use to discover relevant content. The company is also developing new tools to help creators get discovered and license their work more easily.
Read through 12 pages of the pitch deck Catch+Release used to raise its $8.8 million Series A round:
Note: Two slides containing confidential information were removed at Catch+Release’s request. These slides included information about social proof and customer ROI.
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