Alexandra Debow was building a photo-sharing app for sorority girls when she accidentally stumbled into a $200 billion industry’s biggest blind spot.
The 24-year-old Thiel Fellow is the founder and CEO of Swsh—a fan engagement platform for live experiences. The company raised a $4 million seed round, Fortune has exclusively learned. Game Changers Ventures led the round, with participation from Stellation Capital, SignalFire, and MaC Venture Capital. The angels include Scooter Braun, Guy Oseary, Morning Brew‘s Austin Rief, and GGV’s Hans Tung.
Swsh launched in 2022 as a shared photo album for college campuses—sororities, frat parties, anyone who wanted to find photos of themselves from the night before. But users kept dragging the app somewhere Swsh hadn’t planned for: “Over the weekends they’d create albums and bring them to sports events and artist events,” Debow told me. “We realized it wasn’t just the fan who really enjoyed this—it was also the brand, the business, the artist. They want to connect with their fans.”
So, Debow flipped the model: the consumer front end stays fan-first, but the back end now sells to Sony, Warner, UMG, and “hundreds of artists” who deploy Swsh on tour and collect all the content fans upload. The $5.9 billion fan engagement platform market alone is projected to reach 25.4 billion by 2034.
