Artist Republik, the Providence-based decentralized networking platform for independent music artists, has raised a $540,000 seed round.
Working as a strategic partner on Artist Republik's behalf, previous investor David Beirne brought on Lameck Humble Lukanga, Bob Brown, former Bryant University president Ron Machtley and others as new investors. CEO and founder Nicholas Cianfaglione told Rhode Island Inno that Artist Republik secured one other big-name investor: a music artist whose identity he's keeping under wraps for the next couple of weeks.
Closing a seed round is a major step for Artist Republik, which made its debut at the beginning of this year and found itself with an 11,000-person waiting list within two weeks. Within six months, there were 17,000 users on the platform.
"I would confidently say that on the infrastructure side of the company, we are somewhere where no other startup, in the first six months of their life, would be anywhere close to," said Cianfaglione, who is also still a student at Bryant University.
Counterintuitively, Cianfaglione believes it's actually a good time to be leading a platform for music artists. The Covid-19 pandemic may have put a temporary halt to in-person shows, but Artist Republik also boasts a suite of digital tools designed to help artists manage, market and book themselves, as well as grow their social profiles.
The pandemic gave Cianfaglione's team an opportunity to build out their platform's infrastructure on the back end. Now, Artist Republik is preparing for smaller venues—the dive bars and cafés where independent artists tend to perform—to reopen.
"This fall, we're not going to see 100,000-cap music venues. We're not going to see arenas and Xfinity Centers selling out. But you may see the 100-cap bars reopening and the local artists getting back out there," Cianfaglione said. "For us, it's almost the perfect time. We're a platform built around the independent artist."
Artist Republik now has a team of nine employees, several of whom were boosted to full-time status with the cash from the seed round. The new capital will also be used to develop new marketing strategies to bring in new users.
Next spring, Cianfaglione said, Artist Republik plans to raise a Series A round, at which point the startup will establish a physical headquarters. (Currently, everyone is working remotely.) The team is entertaining the options of moving to Austin or Nashville—cities with notoriously thriving independent music scenes—but Cianfaglione wants to stay in Providence, whose community he says has been instrumental in Artist Republik's success so far. Artist Republik is currently one of 11 local startups in this year's MassChallenge Rhode Island cohort.
"The biggest thing for us is we got early involved at CIC, [the Cambridge Innovation Center], and then from that point, everything—from the connections I made at Venture Café, the professors at Bryant introducing me to local Providence people, our law firms in Providence, our board members," Cianfaglione said. "I've met so many amazing people in Providence. So many other startups. The connections in Providence are endless."
