Fintech Stakeholder Labs raises seed round from Alexis Ohanian’s VC

• Stakeholder Labs helps companies identify and engage with retail investors.
• CEO and co-founder Matt Joanou observed the untapped potential of retail investors while on Reddit.
• The startup raised a $4.2 million seed round led by a Reddit co-founder’s venture firm.

This startup wants to help companies engage with their retail investors, and it just received backing from an investor well-versed in building active communities.

Stakeholder Labs provides plug-in software that verifies a company’s shareholders and measures customer behavior with the goal of driving long-term loyalty. The financial technology company sees untapped potential in the emotional connection between Millennials and Gen Zers and the companies they invest in.

On Tuesday, Stakeholder Labs announced a $4.2 million seed round led by Seven Seven Six, a venture firm founded by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of social media site Reddit and husband of star athlete Serena Williams. A spokesperson declined to share Stakeholder Labs’ valuation.

“The hypothesis is that retail investors can be more stable, better advocates and ultimately better supporters of the brand because they are often not only shareholders, but they are also customers and actually care about the brand,” Matt Joanou, CEO and co-founder of Stakeholder Labs , Insider told.

“Not trying to convert that customer into a shareholder is the biggest missed opportunity,” added Max Goldstein, head of marketing and shareholder experience at Stakeholder Labs.

Stakeholder Lab’s software, called Roundtable, is integrated directly into a company’s website or app, allowing customers to identify themselves as shareholders. After submitting their broker information, Roundtable verifies the user and collects shareholder data such as how many shares they hold, the total value of those shares and how long they have held them.

Roundtable will always use a broker account self-verification process to maintain privacy standards, a spokesperson said.

Roundtable presents and contextualizes the data through a dashboard, and Stakeholder Labs helps businesses create a campaign to engage with them, such as offering unique rewards to investors such as early access to a new product.

‘Call of Duty’ and free popcorn

Joanou saw the rise of the retail investor from the backend at Reddit from 2016 to 2021, where he most recently served as global agency head and launched Reddit’s global agency team in New York. His time there was during the “height of audience marketing” and “community-based marketing,” he said.

“We came up with this whole new idea of, ‘Hey, you can actually go after niche communities that really care about Call of Duty or really care about World of Warcraft, and even if it’s a smaller number — it’s not tens of millions of people — they’re going to be your advocates and they’re going to be the ones carrying the flag for your brand,” Joanou said.

The CEO’s “lightbulb moment” for founding the startup came in 2021 when AMC Theaters began offering its shareholders free popcorn every time they visited the theater in an effort to boost ticket sales.

“I was wondering what software is running this? And it turns out it wasn’t a ton of software they were using. It was still a brilliant campaign,” Joanou said. “So we wanted to build software where any platform, out of the box, could launch a program like this, and more importantly, they could measure its effectiveness.”

Joanou expects more brokerages to build similar tools, but he sees them as complementary rather than competing.

“They help carry the banner of retail investor engagement,” Joanou said.

Companies that Joanou considers more direct competitors include Tiicker, Stockperks, Robinhood’s Say Technologies, Pulse and VandaTrack.

Stakeholder Lab’s clients range from small to mid-sized publicly traded companies that tend to be more agile and willing to try new technologies. The start-up currently has three customers.

It has also worked with private companies, including Skybound Entertainment, the company behind the TV series “The Walking Dead.” Stakeholder Labs helped Skybound raise over $12 million through a Regulation A+ crowdfunding campaign in December 2022, where fans could invest in the company for the first time.

Joanou said the startup is “in conversation with many blue-chip players” and wants to use the software for private companies that use equity crowdfunding campaigns. There are two publicly traded companies preparing to announce shareholder reward campaigns using Roundtable, a spokesperson said.