- Listed Fans raises funding of $1.6 m led by Whiteboard Capital and Good Water Capital partners to tokenize human capital.
- The world’s first stock market of people to leverage their social influence to raise capital.
Listed Fans announces an investment of $1.6m raised from Whiteboard Capital and Goodwater Capital. A global techno-legal platform that brings in the advantage of tokenizing human talent in the emerging creator economy. Allowing people with social media followings to tokenize their future potential thereby raising capital for their existing/next projects, in return giving their fans/followers an opportunity to invest in something that they truly understand and connect with. For the first time ever, an opportunity for Humans to directly invest in fellow Humans.
Fans/investors are issued social Tokens, which represent a stake in the future earnings of the creator/project, and also get exclusive access to loads of fandom/content perks. Any new investor may choose to buy income-sharing tokens or fan experiences from the early backers/investors at a premium as the popularity of the creator increases. Investors are also entitled to creator Incomes which are distributed amongst token holders on a pro-rata basis, analogous to dividends in stock markets.
As tech entrepreneurs have immense access to capital via institutional VCs and individual angel investors, no similar sources of capital exist for individual performers or Social Media influencers, singers, musicians, comedians, sportsmen, and so on. In an endeavor to curate a model to be a very close replica of the public stock markets but of individual talents, they created a platform where income sharing social tokens and Fan Experiential NFTs will be traded off-chain and users will neither have to create any Blockchain wallets nor have to pay any gas fees whatsoever. The founders like to call it Web 2.5, where the beauty of the ideas of Web 3 such as fractional ownership, liquid markets, and common incentives are married with and implemented on the common man’s rails of fiat money.
The platform is a brainchild of Mr. Nikunj Jain, IIT Delhi ‘10, Forbes 30U30 Asia (2018), presently in his fourth entrepreneurial stint, the previous one including a snackable video platform by the name of FranklyMe, then backed by Matrix Partners. Along with him are Alan Dsouza another serial entrepreneur with multiple bootstrapped journeys from 0 to $5M+ ARR in Adtech, Gaming, Mobile VAS, and Creator Economy, and Akash Tanwar, a Data Scientist from IIT Delhi ‘17.
“There are about 7.5Bn people on Earth, yet less than 7.5Mn actually understand how stock markets work, and less than 75000 understand how Cryptocurrencies work, but over 4 Bn people spend 2.5 hours a day scrolling through social media content feeds, so why can’t we simplify and just have an asset class that all of us understand and requires no special training whatsoever. After all, the ability to judge a fellow human’s potential and intentions is a talent mother nature has been honing in us humans for thousands of years,” – says Mr. Nikunj Jain, Founder, Listed Fans
Adding some insights, Mr. Alan Dsouza, Co-Founder, Listed Fans said – “We believe the opportunity is immense, For instance, Binance is a 5-year-old cryptocurrency exchange with daily trading volumes exceeding $22Bn with just 350 odd currencies being traded on the platform. If we can build a stock exchange where 5000 humans are traded in the next 8-10 years then we’re onto something very serious”
Backing them as marquee investors are Kunal Shah- CRED, Varun Alagh- MamaEarth, Sumit-CoinDCX, and Suhail Sameer -BharatPe CEO, Niraj Singh-Spinny, Saahil-Shoprocket and prominent content creators like Satish Ray, Papa CJ, and Raj Shamani along with prominent Angels investors like Rahul Jindal (Director@ Google), Vinay Chholeti (Whatsapp Payments), Hemant Gupta (MD @ Morgan Stanley), Uday Arya (BlueLotus Ventures), Rahul Dalmia (Polygon), Siva Sagiraju (Meta), Arjun Vaidya (Dr. Vaidyas), and others.
Listed fans have already onboarded 35 content creators who are ready to launch their IPO (Initial Person Offering) in the coming weeks and more are joining soon, these would be from different genres including gamers, singers, and comedians.
The first IPO is already live featuring Mihir Joshi, an Instagram Creator, Official WWE commentator, Sneaker Collector, and a Web Show host.
“I believe with Listed we have an interesting opportunity to bring the innovations and advantages of tokenization to the masses, in a manner and an industry, almost untouched and unexplored, but much needed. Needless to say, that meritocratic access to capital for creators can really accelerate the future of the Passion economy in the country.” –says Sumit Gupta, Founder, CoinDCX
India is a land of more than 50 million content creators spread across global apps. Global Creator market size has also seen significant growth of over $104 billion. The coming years are expected to see a massive growth in Tier II and Tier III cities fuelling the community with over 100 million creators in the next few years. Just like Web 3, The Creator economy is already embracing crowd capital, we can either leverage it or ignore it.
Weblink: https://listed.fans/
