Collaboration On-Chain: Our Investment in Reveel
Moment Ventures co-leads Reveel’s pre-seed round
The Future of Work is Collaborative
In industries such as music, art, film, and gaming, intermediaries emerged to serve as gatekeepers in connecting creators with their audiences. In doing so, they became more powerful and often more well off than the creators themselves. As content becomes more collaborative, and as contributors transition from for-hire labor to stakeholders in the success of the collaboration, there is a massive unlock in value brewing. This value transfer is starting to surface early in digital goods on the blockchain, but will soon unlock massive value in music, art, and other physical goods too. The tide is changing and Web3 is the enabling infrastructure.
When digital assets are sold, a payout wallet receives a large percentage of the purchase price (minus gas fees, listing fees, etc.). At first glance, this seems fairly simple and straightforward. However, what if that asset was created by multiple people or entities? What happens when that good is resold and contributors need to be paid? What if the creator has various collections across different blockchains? Managing this is a nightmare. Taking it a step further, how does the creator know which creations are performing best? Which ones are being resold more frequently? In the current ecosystem, creators have almost zero visibility into their income whatsoever. This is only exacerbated when they try to marry their on-chain revenue with traditional streaming revenues, licenses, merchandise and other sources. Their best shot is to reconcile blockchain-based revenue is to scour through the blockchain databases (such as via etherscan), download a csv file, upload to excel, and put on their accounting hat.
Issues for creators only get more complex as Web3 use cases expand and as more creators work across blockchains. Creators should be able to offload this work to a financial stack built for them so that they can get back to creating.
Introducing Reveel
Reveel is the new way Web3 creators get paid. Reveel is building a financial stack that aggregates and automates revenue distributions to creators. Creators or collaborators can view their share of royalties across all of their NFTs across multiple blockchains. Reveel automatically distributes the proper percentages of proceeds upon a sale or resale. Creators are demanding ways to automate their back-office finance and accounting. Reveel is building the applications and infrastructure to support them where they need it.
Reveel’s initial core features are “Revenue Paths” and royalty tracking. Revenue Paths are a set of configurable smart contracts whereby the specific percentage payouts between collaborators are programmed. The company is working with existing smart contracts and platforms to enable plug-and-play ease of use. Reveel is releasing the Reveel Protocol (v1) today that allows creators to recoup advances or set different revenue paths for a primary vs. secondary sale. Reveel is starting on the Ethereum blockchain at launch, but they are already working on supporting other chains.
From Najavibes to NYC
I met Adrien Stern, CEO and founder of Reveel, in the depths of a Slack channel from our shared former university, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). Adrien isn’t the typical founder, but the perfect one for what he’s building. Adrien spent nearly a decade as a creator and operator in the music industry, having co-founded a touring Swiss Reggae band (Najavibes), and then created and managed a record label (Bridge Music). From conversations with artists and creators, it was clear that Adrien had an obvious understanding of the problem. Adrien has deep industry connections and the passion to guide the industry towards this inevitable future. Needless to say, Adrien embodies founder-market fit. The team has been remote since inception, as Adrien is based in New York City while the development team is spread across the US and South America.
Music as the Wedge
At Moment Ventures, we constantly look for that sense of urgency that will propel a given company into the stratosphere. Customers, partners, employees, and everyone in between must be ready and willing to flock to the solution. As the Web3 landscape expands, the tooling and infrastructure required for creators will become more and more essential. Reveel is working to make the lives of creators easier and truly take advantage of what blockchain-based software allows. Music-based NFT royalties are a great entry point for Reveel, as they represent a large unmet need for these artists.
Music is, by definition, a combination of two entities that require attribution and royalty management, the composition (the written song) and the sound recording (the actual audio). Tracking these royalties and redistributing them properly to collaborators is challenging to say the least. Some NFT marketplaces do this, to varying degrees, while others rely on creators to build their own smart contracts to perform the revenue splits.
Creators have multiple sources of revenue and other mediums in which they earn their living. All of these have different ownership dynamics that Reveel can manage. Additionally, headaches like accounting and tax preparation are natural add-ons to make Reveel the back-office operating system for the ecosystem.
Jamming Along
On behalf of the entire Moment Ventures team, we are proud to have co-led Reveel’s pre-seed round with Binance Labs earlier this year. Stay tuned as Reveel pioneers the future of financial infrastructure for Web3 creators, revolutionizing how collaboration is managed in the future.
Matt Divack is a Principal at Moment Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund with offices in Palo Alto and New York City. You can reach/follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
