fan-engagement
(7)
Sankar Jayaram
Sankar (Jay) Jayaram is the co-founder and CEO of Quintar, a Santa Clara startup building augmented reality experiences for live sports. A former Washington State University engineering professor who founded the school's virtual reality lab in 1994, he co-founded VOKE with his wife Uma Jayaram, sold it to Intel in 2016, and served as CTO of Intel Sports before spinning out Quintar in 2021. Quintar became the official AR developer for the PGA Tour and shipped PGA Tour Vision for Apple Vision Pro.
Matt Jones
Matt Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Medallion, a New York-based platform that lets artists build branded, artist-owned digital environments where their most engaged fans can pay for early access, exclusive drops, and premium music formats. Before Medallion he ran Crowdsurge, the direct-to-fan ticketing company he started in 2008 that later merged with Songkick; he served as Songkick's CEO through its 2017 acquisition by Warner Music Group. Medallion closed a $13.7M Series A in December 2023 led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, with Metallica's Black Squirrel Partners, Coinbase Ventures, and members of Disclosure, Jungle, and Mt. Joy also on the cap table.
Anj Fayemi
Anj Fayemi is a Lagos-raised, MIT-trained mechanical engineer and recording rapper (Solstice Fayemz) who turned his own frustration releasing a second album into Rivet, an AI-driven CRM that helps artists and creators find and grow their most loyal fans. As co-founder and CEO, he interviewed 200+ artists, went through Techstars Boston, raised a $500k pre-seed led by Drive Capital, and built a platform used by roughly 1,400 creators that stitches together data from Instagram, Shopify and Eventbrite to surface the fans most likely to show up and buy.
Haley Rosen
Haley Rosen is the founder and CEO of Just Women's Sports, the digital media company she launched in January 2020 to fix a number that had not budged in a decade: roughly 4% of all sports coverage went to women. A former Stanford midfielder who played professionally before injuries ended her career, Rosen built JWS from a single Instagram account into a leading women's sports media platform with podcasts, editorial, live programming, events, and merchandise, backed by investors including Kevin Durant and Joe Tsai. Her core argument, delivered on the TEDxBoston stage, is blunt: stop treating women's sports like a charity and start covering them like sports.
Ari Evans
Ari Evans is the founder and CEO of Maestro, the Los Angeles-based white-label live streaming and interactive video platform he started in 2015. He built Maestro on a simple conviction: creators and rights holders should own their audiences and data instead of renting them from algorithm-driven giants. The platform powers interactive streams, monetization and analytics for clients ranging from Billie Eilish and Post Malone to Epic Games, PlayStation and ViacomCBS, and counts Sony Music among its investors. A former Zynga product manager who ran CityVille at its peak, Evans frames the creator economy as the biggest job-creation engine since the Industrial Revolution.
Vaidhy Murti
Vaidhy Murti is the founder and CEO of WIT, a New York fan-engagement and consumer-data platform that runs sponsored contests, polls, and instant-win games for teams across the NFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, and NCAA. A Princeton computer-science grad, he built his first company, the college dating app Friendsy, out of his dorm room and became the youngest founder backed by Lerer Hippeau at 21. WIT took four years and three pivots to turn profitable, and now powers digital activations for nearly 100 venues, leagues, and Fortune 1000 brands.
Vicente Fernandez
Vicente Fernandez is the co-founder and CEO of SportsManias, the Miami company that turned officially licensed sports emojis and augmented reality filters into a fan-passion business. A University of Chicago football player turned media entrepreneur, he started the company at 19 after a phone call from his mother and co-founder, Aymara Del Aguila. He went on to ship the first officially licensed NFL player AR stickers in partnership with TikTok and the NFLPA, land on Forbes 30 Under 30 for Sports, and get invited to the White House as an Emerging Global Entrepreneur.