Breaking
Rivet turns scattered fan signals into one owned view 1,400+ creators onboarded and counting $500K pre-seed led by Drive Capital New artist-team email builder ships with Symphonic Born from a musician's broken spreadsheet in Boston From MIT dorm to Techstars to real revenue Rivet turns scattered fan signals into one owned view 1,400+ creators onboarded and counting $500K pre-seed led by Drive Capital New artist-team email builder ships with Symphonic Born from a musician's broken spreadsheet in Boston From MIT dorm to Techstars to real revenue
Company Profile / Music Technology / Boston, MA

Rivet.

The AI fan engine that reads every signal your fans leave - then turns the loudest ones into buyers. One view. Every channel. Owned by the artist.

AI Fan CRM Founded 2021 Seed-stage Creator Economy
Rivet logo
FIG. 1 - The mark of Rivet. A rivet is the fastener that holds things together for good. Fitting, for a company betting everything on fan loyalty.
1,400+
Active Creators
$620K
Total Raised
8,000
Largest Fanbase
1%
Built For The Other 99
The Scene

A dashboard, glowing at 2 a.m.

Somewhere right now, an artist's manager is staring at a Rivet screen. Not a spreadsheet - a living map of a fanbase. It shows which listener bought merch twice, which one has gone quiet for ninety days, and which superfan is one nudge away from a VIP ticket. A campaign fires. The next morning, a single email has done what a month of hopeful posting could not: it moved money. This is Rivet's ordinary Tuesday - the unglamorous, deeply useful work of noticing fans one at a time, at a scale no human roster could manage alone.

That screen exists because a musician once did not have it. Rivet's founders built the tool they wished they'd had - and then handed it to everyone the music business tends to overlook.

Rivet gives creators ownership of their fan communities and empowers them to succeed and generate sustainable incomes within an industry otherwise built for the top 1 percent.
- Rivet, on why it exists
The Origin

It started with a spreadsheet that gave up

Anj Fayemi was a performing musician with a problem every independent artist knows: crowds are easy, fans are hard. He tracked his listeners in a spreadsheet until the spreadsheet buckled under the weight of the thing it was trying to hold - a relationship.

Comparing notes with other artists, Fayemi found the frustration was universal. So he teamed up with Simran Pabla and Nafim Rahman - fellow builders at MIT - and turned a personal annoyance into a company. In Boston's Winter 2021 Techstars class, still undergraduates, they raised their first $120,000. The pitch was simple and slightly heretical: the independent artist, not the label, should own the fan.

2021
Three MIT students join Techstars Boston (Winter 2021), raise $120K, and ship the first version of Rivet.
2022 / Q2
Named to Built In Boston's Future 5. Passes 1,000 artists on the platform; largest community hits ~8,000 fans.
2023 / FEB
Closes $500K pre-seed led by Drive Capital, with The Hustle Fund and Visible Hands participating.
2025 / APR
Launches an AI-assisted email builder made specifically for artist teams, in collaboration with Symphonic.
What It Does

Attention is cheap. Rivet makes it pay rent.

Fans scatter their signals across a dozen platforms - a like here, a stream there, a merch order somewhere else. Rivet's whole trick is refusing to let those fragments stay scattered.

01

Fan CRM

Consolidates every fan signal from social, commerce, ticketing, streaming and community into one owned profile - each with an engagement score.

02

Segmentation

Machine learning surfaces superfans, loyal buyers and churn risks, and shows where each fan sits in their journey.

03

Email Builder

Smart templates, artist-specific blocks for tours and merch, and behavior-triggered sequences for drops and VIP offers.

04

Automations

DM and Discord automations, gated content and UGC capture, plus campaigns across email, SMS, DMs and ads from one place.

05

Attribution

End-to-end tracking of how each interaction actually drove revenue - across the full customer journey.

06

Roster Tools

Multi-artist, multi-brand management for labels, managers and festivals running many audiences at once.

The Funnel

From a like to a loyal buyer

The gap between attention and a sale is where most careers quietly die. Rivet decided to live there.

STEP 01
NoticePull every fan signal into one place
STEP 02
RankScore fans by real engagement
STEP 03
ReachEmail, SMS, DMs and ads, targeted
STEP 04
ConvertMerch, tickets, streams, campaigns
STEP 05
AttributeSee exactly what drove the revenue
The Money

$120K to $500K, one believer at a time

No mega-round, no hype cycle. Rivet's funding reads like its product philosophy: build trust, then compound it.

RoundAmountDateLead / Investors
Accelerator$120,0002021Techstars Boston
Pre-Seed$500,000Feb 2023Drive Capital · The Hustle Fund · Visible Hands
$120K
2021
Techstars
$500K
2023
Pre-Seed
$620K
Total
Raised

Fig. 2 - Cumulative capital raised. Figures per public reporting; totals approximate.

The Roster

Who's actually on it

Musicians, podcasters, digital creators, managers, labels, festivals and brands. Over 1,400 active creators, with the biggest community around 8,000 fans - including producer Jon Glass, whose credits run through BIA and J. Cole.

Teams using Rivet generate tens of thousands of dollars from a single campaign.
- On the payoff of knowing your fans
Why It Matters

Ownership is the quiet revolution

First-party fan data used to be a label's asset. Rivet's argument is that it should belong to the person who made the art. Every platform is happy to rent an artist their own audience; Rivet is the case for owning it outright - the email list, the segments, the relationship. That is not a feature. It is a stance.

And it is why the company keeps pointing at the same number: the top 1 percent. The music industry's tooling was built for stadiums. Rivet builds for bedrooms, dorm rooms and DIY tours - the vast majority of creators the machinery was never designed to serve. If it works, the middle class of music gets a business model it never had.

Watch & Explore

See it in motion

Product demos, how-tos and interviews live on Rivet's own channels.

Back To The Scene

2 a.m., revisited

Return to that glowing dashboard. A few years ago it was a spreadsheet, and the person staring at it felt the fanbase slipping through the cells. Now the same person watches a fan move from a quiet like to a sold-out show - and can point to the exact message that did it.

Rivet didn't invent the superfan. It just refused to let anyone lose track of them. That is the whole company: a fastener for the loosest, most valuable relationship in music. The spreadsheet gave up. Rivet held.

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Sources & Further Reading