Anj Fayemi
He stopped making albums long enough to fix the thing that made albums miserable to release. That fix is now a company called Rivet.
Anj "Fayemz" Fayemi. Engineering major, theatre minor, ad-lib enthusiast.
Find the fans who actually show up
Most music tech counts followers. Anj Fayemi builds the opposite. Rivet, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO, ignores the vanity number and goes looking for the handful of people who buy the merch, drive to the show, and pre-save the single before anyone asks. The product stitches together what an artist already has scattered across Instagram, Shopify and Eventbrite, then uses machine learning to point at the names that matter.
The pitch is one sentence: software that tells a creator who their real fans are and what to say to them next. Rivet builds fan segments, flags the people most likely to attend or purchase, and recommends the action to take. Roughly 1,400 creators use it. Drive Capital led a $500,000 pre-seed. The Hustle Fund and Visible Hands came along. The company went through Techstars Boston and, in 2023, picked up the road and moved its center of gravity to Chicago.
None of this started as a business plan. It started as a grudge.
What Rivet does
Pulls fan data from the tools creators already use, then surfaces the superfans most likely to buy a ticket or a hoodie - and tells you when to reach out.
Solstice Fayemz
His recording name. The engineer and the artist share a bio and, occasionally, a calendar.
A second album, and a spreadsheet that wouldn't behave
Fayemi grew up in Lagos in a household tilted toward art - an artist father, music in the walls. He took the engineering route partly to use an educational opening, landing at MIT (class of 2020) by way of Imperial College London, with a Theatre Arts minor stapled on for good measure. Before the startup, he did a stint in finance at BlackRock and rode shotgun on a few early-stage teams.
Then he tried to release his second album. The release itself was fine. Everything around it was not. Figuring out who had shown up last time, who had bought something, who actually cared - that information existed, scattered and useless, across half a dozen apps. Pulling it into one place to promote the new record was, in his word, tedious.
He did the engineer thing. Before building, he checked whether the problem was his alone. He talked to more than 200 artists and creators. It wasn't his alone. So in 2020, with co-founders Nafim Rahman and Simran Pabla, he built Rivet.
Simran Pabla
A Master's in Machine Learning from MIT, where she met Fayemi at an engineering leadership program. Her shipping philosophy: "if you're not embarrassed by the first release, you waited too long."
Nafim Rahman
The third name on the founding team that turned a personal frustration into a platform.
The builder and the artist
Anj Fayemi
Runs Rivet. Raises capital. Keeps a written list of people he needs to meet and works it line by line. Treats a "no" as the start of a follow-up sequence, not the end of a conversation.
Solstice Fayemz
Records and performs. Has shared a stage opening for Grammy-nominated 6lack. Says the most fun part of the whole process is laying down ad libs. The customer he understands best is himself.
How it happened
The raise, in scale
The network play
One declined investment, kept warm with monthly updates and genuine admiration, eventually turned into a curated dinner invite - and eight new Chicago contacts. He does not let relationships go cold.
An operating system for a creative career
Fayemi doesn't talk about Rivet as a marketing tool. He talks about it as infrastructure. The destination he describes is a platform that holds the whole back office of a creative life - music first, then podcasting, then whatever comes next - so that a working artist can run a business without becoming a full-time data analyst.
That ambition is recognizable because it's personal. He is the customer. He has the scattered spreadsheets, the loyal fans he can't quite find, the album he wants to promote without losing a weekend to copy-paste. The bet behind Rivet is simple: the tools that serve creators should be built by people who have actually felt the problem at 2 a.m.
He credits the Nigerian entrepreneurs who mentored him for getting him here, and calls his own path "very mentorship-driven." It tracks. The man keeps a list of people to meet and emails every one of them.
- Records under the name Solstice Fayemz.
- Engineering major, Theatre Arts minor at MIT.
- Opened for Grammy-nominated 6lack.
- Says recording ad libs is the most fun part of music.
- Grew up in Lagos in an artistic family, with an artist father.
Find Anj & Rivet
Filed under: founders who are also their own first customer.