Amazing milestone and well-deserved fuel for Allstar and team! The data behind this company and the exceptional growth are impossible to ignore -- we're excited to share our first co-investment with Drive Capital.
I'm so excited to share that Allstar closed our $12M Series A led by Drive Capital! From the first zoom, to taking home a term sheet from Drive's office, we knew we found the right partners to take us to the next level ?? Recounting our journey, I remember when Gavin Silver and I decided we were ready to start Allstar. We put our notices in and soon after we were bootstrapping with no salary for over a year. Our friends and family thought it was a "bold move" (truthfully they were AMAZINGLY supportive, we could never do this alone.) Thankfully it didn't take long before Mark Cuban invested which set us on the trajectory we're on today. If only we knew how difficult our journey would become! We had no idea we'd move into our first office and 2 months later COVID would force us to build Allstar remotely for over 2 years. This delayed our next round almost a full year, and vastly changed our approach to building the business. Eventually the stay-at-home world brought a lot of positive attention to the creator economy and gaming, which helped set the stage to our Seed in 2021 led by members of the New York Angels. Soon after, the economy turned which caused the cost of capital to rise, and proved to be a tricky transition for anyone in tech. We had to make tough choices and one of those was eliminating all paid advertising from user acquisition. In hindsight this was a great move we wish we made sooner. It forced us to innovate, build a better product, and figure out how to grow in a scrappier way. This led to our userbase exploding, deeper traction, and accelerating revenue. Time for Series A! Like any fundraise, it was challenging and took many months of endless pitching, being on the road, and following up - until we finally landed the right partners: John Volquez and Chris Olsen of Drive Capital. For all our prep, research, list building, and strategic outreach, it was Drive who came to us. Talk about an important email you don't want to miss! We knew we found great partners when they were hustling just as hard as we were, from late night emails to jumping on planes to have in-person meetings. Like a scene out of a movie, after a great partner meeting, we flew home to New York with term sheet in-hand... well, I flew home – Gavin missed his flight and stayed the night. It's never easy! We're SO thrilled to put this capital to work scaling. We're investing in infrastructure, expanding the team, adding new games, and accelerating partnerships & bizdev. Thank you to everyone on Team Allstar and all our amazing partners, investors, advisors, customers, family and supporters for making this possible. We've generated nearly 30M clips for over 1.14M unique gaming creators, reaching 11.5M+ people driving over a quarter-billion views. 4 years in and we are JUST getting started. I can't wait to see where we go next. https://lnkd.in/gUNbFi6W #gaming #creatoreconomy #startups #tech #nyc