Crowd-Funding Patreon Scores $15 Million Series A to Support Artists & Creators

Big news for Patreon -- a Bay Area-based digital media company I have tracked closely for nearly a year (since the time I met CEO Jack Conte in the “green room" of Bloomberg TV just before each of us had our respective segments).  The company just scored a massive $15 million Series A round of financing led by Index Ventures (and with several other blue chip investors) (no wonder he is smiling in the picture) -- tremendous validation for a company whose mission is “to fund and empower the emerging creative class.”

How?  Patreon uniquely enables all of us to be patrons of the arts by taking a different spin on crowd-funding -- i.e., giving fans the ability to make recurring payments to content creators (musicians, video creators, artists) in order to support them monetarily on a continuing (rather than “one off”) basis for the art that moves them.  Conte -- a great, authentic guy -- understands the world of artists well (and the challenges to making a living), since he is a musician himself.  I recently profiled him and Patreon as part of my “5 Questions With ...” exclusive interviews (which you can check out here -- very informative).


Here are some recent “fun facts” that fueled this investment:

-- the company’s revenues grew 10X in the past 5 months;
-- the company launched just 13 months ago with 3 creators using its platform; that number is now over 25,000!
-- 180 new creators are signing up every day
-- here is a big one -- the company has sent over $2 million to creators since its launch 13 months ago (with $1 million of that being sent to artists in just the past 2 months)

In other words, Patreon’s platform is working.  And, this $15 million won’t hurt it accelerate those already-impressive numbers.  Good news for Patreon.  Great news for artists (and all of us who support them)!