Austin, Texas-based company StoryFit announced it raised $1.75 million in a new round of funding led by ff Venture Capital. Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI), Ascend Venture Capital, Walt Winshall, and leading technology startup accelerators Techstars and Capital Factory also participated in this round.
StoryFit is known for providing predictive AI analytics for the publishing and entertainment industry. And StoryFit’s data-driven is able to consistently inform decision making throughout the lifecycle of a story from acquisition and creative development through its production greenlight and marketing and distribution. And StoryFit uses AI to measure over 100,000 key features and compare to thousands of other books or scripts to generate actionable insights.
“The strategic and operational support we’ll receive from this stellar group of investors is as important as the funding,” said StoryFit founder and CEO Monica Landers in a statement. “We look forward to benefiting from the breadth of media and publishing connections and experience that our investors can provide and we’re excited by both the new participants in this round as well as those that are returning.”
This funding round will be used for making key hires and to make further advancements in content-based analytics including predictive technology, audience identification, and industry trends. Recently StoryFit expanded its senior team by hiring Rudy Prince as COO and naming data scientist Mark Bessen as CTO.
Prior to joining StoryFit, Prince worked as a public company CEO and has more than 30 years of experience. And Prince has also worked as an executive, a mentor and an advisor to a number of Austin-based startups. And he worked as the founder and CEO of eFax.com where he led the IPO and the acquisition by J2 Global.
And Bessen joined StoryFit from Apple where he worked on the iBooks recommendations system. Bessen is also known for providing data research support for The Bestseller Code (2016).
“We have been incredibly impressed with StoryFit’s data science edge which was confirmed by a number of industry experts to be unmatched by any other company in the entertainment space,” added ff Venture Capital partner Adam Plotkin. “We believe StoryFit’s data-driven insights will revolutionize the way content decisions are made and marketed and we see tremendous growth potential in the company.”
Landers is experienced in media production as she worked at ABC News and Good Morning America. And she also held executive roles at multiple media companies including Demand Media. Landers holds two media technology patents and also worked as a mentor for the Techstars and Comcast startup accelerators.
“What attracted us to StoryFit is the way its NLP machine learning technology can be applied across a wide range of media properties,” explained BDMI partner Keith Titan. “The rapidly developing capabilities of artificial intelligence combined with advanced NLP machine learning are opening up exciting opportunities to provide both creatives and marketers with new data-based tools to help them discover actionable insights for a variety of content—and StoryFit is at the cutting edge of media meets machine learning.”
