Antenna, a startup that provides analytics about subscription businesses, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Raine Ventures.
Antenna, which launched in February amid a boom in direct-to-consumer entertainment services, was built on the thesis that new metrics would be needed to determine the winners and losers of the streaming wars. The company uses data around customer transactions to provide insights into a service’s growth, churn rates and retention.
Though the company didn’t plan to launch right before the coronavirus pandemic, it was able to take advantage of the rise in streaming consumption that occurred as people began to spend more time at home. “We saw really incredible momentum from the market,” says co-founder and CEO Rameez Tase, who started the company with co-founder and chairman Jonathan Carson. “A lot of the trends that we thought would take three-to-five years to happen, it looks like they’re going to take zero-to-one year.”
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In its first 10 months, Antenna has lined up nearly a dozen clients. But the interest is coming not just from the entertainment industry, Tase says, but also other sectors impacted by subscriptions like gaming, audio, health and wellness and education. Tase says the fundraising will help the 12-person Antenna build a scalable insights platform that can service a broader scope of customers and to provide deeper insights for existing clients.
Raine has invested in a number of media businesses over the years, from Vice to Tastemade to Cheddar. “Antenna’s measurement data is unrivaled in the market, and in a short time, the company has become the new industry standard in subscription data,” managing partner Gordon Rubenstein said in an Antenna blog post announcing the fundraising. “Any modern subscription business would benefit from Antenna’s insights.”
The company’s round also includes a group of angel investors from the media world, including strategist Matthew Ball. “It’s easy to be too clever about subscription strategy — these businesses are won through LTV and fought via gross adds, ARPU, churn, and distribution agreements,” Ball said in a statement. “Antenna builds best-in-class insight into these metrics and how they’re affected by decisions like D2SVOD (Wonder Woman) or PVOD (Mulan), and is backed by a team with a history of excellence in growth analytics.”
