Jimmy
McCloud

At a Liverpool Football Club fan activation, something clicked. A crowd of supporters queued up to take photos with a retired football star. DISTINCT Technologies captured their data through the experience - a scan here, a selfie there - and within seconds, every interaction was routed into the client's CRM. Kyle York, who would go on to lead DISTINCT's $3.5M seed round, was standing in that crowd. He saw it happen. He wrote the check.

That moment is the whole pitch. The live event industry puts billions of dollars into experiences that have historically been impossible to measure. A fan walks into a brand activation tent, eats a sample, takes a photo, scans a code - and the brand collects... a head count. Maybe a CSV. Jimmy McCloud built a company to fix that specific, stubborn problem.

DISTINCT Technologies is a live data intelligence platform. In plain terms: it captures consumer behavior data at live brand moments - concerts, sporting events, fan zones, trade shows, brand activations - and routes it in real time to enterprise CRM systems like Salesforce, Adobe, and Snowflake. Not in batch. Not as a report two weeks later. In seconds, while the consumer is still physically standing at the event.

The data DISTINCT collects isn't thin. Each Actionable Consumer Touchpoint - what the company calls an "ACT" - can carry up to 150 behavioral signals. One fan at a Coca-Cola activation might trigger a QR code scan, a photo booth interaction, a push notification response, and a check-in. Each of those touchpoints becomes a richer data point. The profile compounds. And the next time that same consumer shows up at another live moment, DISTINCT's platform already knows them.

At one documented activation, the platform captured 9,000 ACTs. That's 9,000 individual consumer interactions turned into structured data, each one actionable. The client's benchmark was set before the activation. DISTINCT overperformed it by 305%.

McCloud grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, a three-sport athlete - baseball, golf, hockey - who captained all three and earned four All-Star selections on the baseball diamond. He took that competitive instinct to the College of the Holy Cross, where he played Division I baseball as a pitcher and first baseman. He graduated in 2006 with a degree in Political Science and then went to Columbia for a Master's in Sports Management, which was the only résumé maneuver that made sense for someone who wanted to work at the intersection of sports and business.

He ended up at MLB Advanced Media. For nearly a decade - 2008 to 2018 - McCloud worked his way up to Group Director and then Vice President of Sponsorship Sales and Client Services, managing $1B+ in partnership revenue. MLBAM in those years was one of the most interesting technology organizations in American sports: a streaming infrastructure lab that happened to also run baseball's digital business. When Disney acquired its BAMTech division to launch Disney+, the engineers McCloud worked alongside were the ones who built it.

In 2018, Entercom Communications - which had just merged with CBS Radio to become one of America's largest audio networks - hired McCloud as Executive Vice President of National Business Development. The role was newly created for him. He joined the Operating Committee. He oversaw national strategic partnerships across every linear and digital asset the company owned. He was there for the corporate rebrand to Audacy. For four years, he ran partnership revenue at a Fortune 500 media company.

And then, in 2022, he left to found a startup.

That decision - leaving a C-suite position with a large public company to start something from scratch in Fairfield, Connecticut - is the kind of move that either makes complete sense or sounds completely reckless depending on whether you understand the problem McCloud was trying to solve. He'd spent fifteen years watching brands pour money into live experiences and struggle to measure what they got back. He'd seen the data gap from both sides - as the seller of sponsorships and as the operator managing partnerships. DISTINCT is the product of that frustration.

McCloud didn't build DISTINCT alone. He assembled a team whose résumés trace a straight line back to the same infrastructure that powers professional sports and major media. Joe Choti, CTO, built live data systems at MLB Advanced Media and was formerly CEO of Tickets.com - one of the architects of BAMTech's streaming backbone. Pedro Moya, COO, spent fifteen years at Google before West Point and Michigan Ross. The team's collective resume reads like a who's who of the organizations that figured out digital sports media.

The live experience market is not small. Concerts, sporting events, brand activations, trade shows, fan zones - these are where consumer brands spend enormous sums trying to build emotional connection and drive purchase intent. The traditional problem has been measurement. A brand spends $500,000 sponsoring a stage at a music festival and walks away with foot traffic estimates and a survey sample. DISTINCT's argument is that the event itself is generating data at every touchpoint - and that data is being wasted because no infrastructure exists to capture it in real time and send it somewhere useful.

The DISTINCT platform integrates with the physical infrastructure of a live activation: QR code scanners, photo booths, badge readers, POS systems, push notification platforms. Every interaction becomes an Actionable Consumer Touchpoint. Each ACT carries behavioral signals - up to 150 per interaction - which get structured and immediately routed to Salesforce, Adobe, Snowflake, Marketo, or LiveRamp. The consumer at the activation is still holding their drink when their data is already in the CRM.

Enterprise integrations are a deliberate choice. SOC 2 compliance, GDPR, CCPA - the platform was built for Fortune 100 procurement cycles from day one. That's not an accident. McCloud spent a decade selling to Fortune 100 companies at MLB and Entercom. He knows what the procurement process looks like, which questions legal asks, and what a brand's IT security team will require before they let a third-party platform touch their CRM.

The founding team's pedigree does real work here. When DISTINCT walks into Coca-Cola or Verizon or the NHL, they're not introducing themselves as a startup. They're introducing themselves as the team that helped build MLB's digital business - and by extension, a piece of infrastructure that now runs Disney's streaming service. That's a different conversation than most startups get to have.

Kyle York's investment framing is worth taking seriously. York IE is a venture firm that backs B2B software companies, and York himself was explicit on The Full Ratchet podcast about why he led DISTINCT's seed round: McCloud's "sales DNA, BD DNA, and evangelist DNA." At the seed stage, the product is often unfinished. What York was buying was McCloud's ability to open enterprise doors, close deals, and explain a technical product to a Fortune 100 marketing executive in terms they'd act on. That's a rare combination, and it's exactly what you need to sell live data infrastructure to Coca-Cola's marketing team.

The market DISTINCT is going after is large, underdeveloped, and getting more competitive. Experiential marketing is growing. Consumer data regulation is tightening. Enterprise brands are under increasing pressure to show ROI on sponsorship and live event spending. DISTINCT's timing - and McCloud's founder-market fit - sits at the intersection of all three trends at once.