# Starchive Media/AI platform helping creators protect, preserve & maximize creative assets ## Elevator pitch We help creators focus on their creative efforts by taking away the complexity of managing lots of different media files in many different environments. - Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/starchive - Entity ID: wefunder:company:111362 - Last updated: 2026-06-13T05:00:52Z - Generated at: 2026-06-14T01:39:13Z ## Quick facts - 🦄 82,500+ platform users - up 1,640% in the last 12 months - 🚀 Clients including Bob Dylan, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, & Essence Magazine - đź’Ş Product, technology & user experience innovation for a $100+ Billion market - đź’° VC-backed $5.7M raised to date - 🔥 Featured in TechCrunch, Forbes, & Bloomberg, Mashable - ⚡️ Readily scalable – 25M+ user assets currently on the platform - 🤖 Primed for the future of Web3 – Powered by next level AI & Blockchain technologies ## Active fundraises - wefunder:fundraise:60117: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) - wefunder:fundraise:63006: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) ## Story The Short Story: We built Starchive because Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud just don't work for us or the 50+ million creators who work with digital media every day. Bob Dylan was our first customer and we are pioneering a new category of technology combining cloud storage with critical functions for capitalizing on media, spanning both web2 and web3, and priced in a way to make swapping out your old simple cloud storage a no-brainer.The Full Version: Media is the heart of modern culture and commerce. More than 95% of our daily interactions with goods, brands, and people are driven by rich media (photos, videos, gifs,) or multi-media (presentations, pdfs). Starchive exists to unlock the latent value in digital media --through data, auto curation, robust tagging capabilities, and powerful AI so that you can always find what you need when you need it and maximize the value and experience of your digital media.Media files are not like documents and legacy file sharing platforms like Dropbox and simple cloud storage like Google Drive just weren’t built for the complex challenges of media files.Starchive combines key features from:Dropbox but optimized for mediaYouTube but private to your business and your fansWeTransfer but directly connected to your content and capable of streamingGoogle Photos but with AI that serves you, not exploits youOpenSea but private to you and your fans/communityPatreon but leveraging the blockchain so you are 100% in control (coming soon) Why the Creator Economy?The “creator economy” is really just a fancy way of talking about the new opportunities to create income (and even wealth) by sharing your passions and expertise with others who care about the same things via digital media.If the pandemic taught us anything, it was how powerful digital media and experiences can be and how they redefine what it means to work, play, study, exercise, and even connect with others. Today, Creators have been forced to cobble together solutions using a handful of tools like YouTube, Dropbox, and WeTransfer etc. to get their content to their tribes but this sucks up a lot of creative time and energy and cuts down on their productivity.We started with Creators because: we know them best, we have deep credibility in the space, they are the tip of the spear, they are always adopters of new technology, and creatives drive culture. Winning with Creators means the world will follow.The Proof is in our TractionTo create CBS-TV’s “Interrogation” A top Hollywood writer and executive producer needed a fast and reliable way to sift through thousands of images and documents related to a real-life crime for a new docu-drama series. Using Starchive, his six-person writing team, spread around the world, was able to collect, share, and easily curate themes and episodes from hundreds of images and PDF’s. Starchive’s collection capabilities made it easy to collaborate on a groundbreaking non-linear series that sold to CBS All Access. Check out the trailer for the resulting series below:Now - dozens of young filmmakers we have yet to hear about use Starchive in the same way through our partnership withSince 2014, the Bob Dylan Music Company has been working with Starchive to catalog 60+ years of the Nobel Prize winner’s work. The work led to an industry-defining sale of the physical archive to the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) and the University of Tulsa. In 2022, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, OK showcasing thousands of media assets sourced from Starchive and around the world.“Bob Dylan Photos Revealed After 50 Years, Spurring Multi-Billion Archive Business”Forbes Magazine, 2016Rising star Armani White's team started using Starchive in 2020 to capture all the exceptional content he creates every day in formats from his phone to social posts, to raw tracks from the studio. Just last month his top hit Billie Eilish went viral and he is on the move. Think about how powerful it will be to have his fans have access to ALL his content and outtakes as he rides the momentum to fame. Watch his video on YouTubeIn 2020, when COVID caused the Annual ESSENCE Festival of Culture and the ESSENCE 50 Year Anniversary to go 100% virtual, Starchive processed 328,710 minutes (5,478.5 hours) of video for ESSENCE, tagging every celebrity along the timeline in each video in just 8 days, to empower the ESSENCE team to make ESSENCE Fest 2020 a huge success.“This opened up a whole new world of the archive footage that we have, so now we want to use it more.” -Executive Producer - EssenceClick here to read the Amazon Web Services Case Study on this project.Whether you are a Commercial Hero, a Cultural Hero, or a Community Hero - your media tells your story and it is important to your tribe. Read about more use cases from a Presidential Library, to a brewery, to a mindfulness business, and more at the bottom of this page.See what our users say...Why Blockchain?Though we are in the very early days - it is clear that blockchain technologies enable brand new income streams and capabilities that get creators and fans closer together with fewer middlemen. This means a creator can make a decent living with a smaller tribe of passionate fans since they keep more of the value they create. These technologies also make creators the owners of their communities where they get to set the terms and they get to own the audience. If one platform does not serve them any longer, they can take their fans and go elsewhere. This is a fundamental shift in the creator/fan relationship powered by blockchain.Starchive makes it possible for a creator to use blockchain technology to create an NFT or digital collectible. This can be a digital piece of art or it can be a token that represents access to content or partial ownership in a future revenue stream.Eventually, Starchive will make it possible for a creator to provide subscription access to content gated by blockchain tokens and even access to Metaverse experiences like a concert we recently helped the Jerry Garcia family host in Decentraland.All these web3 activities, help us support a cutting-edge creator economy and generate additional revenue for Starchive.Forward looking projections cannot be guaranteed.The need for Starchive doesn’t stop with just CreatorsJust take food for example A cursory search of the #food and #foodporn tags on Instagram will reveal millions of shots (168,422,776 posts and 76,245,234 posts, respectively) of meals, beverages, ingredients, and food makers.This means that every restaurant, brewery, and cocktail bar now has a media problem too. You can swap out just about any industry and find the same thing.Here are a handful of more real use cases from Starchive users, both in media and those using media to drive their business and build their brand. ## FAQ 1. **Here is the question we often get asked: With your current trajectory and traction – why is Starchive crowdfunding?** - Our mission has always been to empower creators and innovators, and we believe that crowdfunding is a powerful way to do just that. It gives our community an investment opportunity they would normally never get, and it allows us yet another method to tightly align our interests with our community of users and empower our fellow creators. 2. **Hello, who are some of your direct competitors? What makes you different/better/competitive advantages over companies like Clipr or Axle AI? You mention that you have raised over 5.7m from VC previously? Can you provide more information on this and any other previous funding r...** - Kim San LEE - Apologies for being a touch slow to get you this reply - I wanted to be sure we thoroughly answered your great questions. I have not used either Clipr or Axle AI before and both look like great products. Clearly, both are primarily focused on video and the use of AI on video for faster indexing search and editing. To contrast, Starchive is designed to manage any file type in any size and format: from 8k footage to your next TikTok video, from multi-track audio to mp3s, from mass... 3. **What is your current amount to raise (fundraising goal)?** - Hello Haley - Please pardon me for being slow to respond. I missed the notice that we had a new question. We have set a fundraising goal of $500k in total with a minimum threshold of $250k. We want to be sure that anyone who wants in from our community has a chance to participate. We will be sending out a notice to all 85k account holders in the next few days. Let me know if you have any other questions or want to talk directly. 4. **Hello, thank you for your reply to last question. So it sounds like you are making a bet that the future, firstly, is in video/media rich content and web3; and secondly, that your focus within that will be on the creator economy as opposed to providing corporate or enterprise ...** - Kim San Lee - you ask the best questions. We should do a podcast together so you can draw some of this deep thinking out of me and help me share it! I’ll break your question into parts. Question: So it sounds like you are making a bet that the future, firstly, is in video/media-rich content and web3; and secondly, that your focus within that will be on the creator economy as opposed to providing corporate or enterprise solutions. Would that be an accurate summary of your vision/business model... 5. **Thank you Richard! I am getting my MBA from USC and am taking an investing in new ventures class. Would you be open to a phone conversation and sharing more information I could conduct due diligence on?** - Absolutely Haley! Let's book a call here if that is okay with you. https://calendly.com/starchive/20min-starchive-intro-call ## Team - Richard Averitt (Co-founder, CEO) - Peter Agelasto (Co-founder, Head of Product Development) - Lexa Pope (Investor/Advisor) - Rishi Jaitly (Advisor) - Shailesh Rao (Advisor) - Kelly Bower (Administration and Accounting) - Stephen Tuso (Lead Engineer) - Morgan Webb (Marketing) - Guilherme Oderdenge (Senior React Engineer) - Thadeu Brito (Full Stack) - Juliano Duarte (Mobile Engineer) - Tyler Sewell (Marketing - Community Wrangler) - Jay Berman (Advisor) ## Recent posts - 8 Days left to close. So for the next 8 days we’ll drop you a daily update. (2023-04-21T19:00:05Z) - We're excited to share with you the fruit of 5 years of collaboration with the Leonard Cohen Archive. (2023-03-24T16:50:28Z) - Congratulations! You did it!! (2023-01-19T21:23:27Z) - Starchive has a Lead Investor for our WeFunder SPV! (2023-01-06T17:27:26Z) - Tour a Starchive of James Brown, The Beatles, Stones & Reams of American History (2022-11-08T19:50:34Z) - Come Meet the Eyes and Ears of Cultural History (2022-10-24T14:42:30Z) - Why Starchive is Different Than Dropbox (2022-10-11T16:23:18Z) - The First One Is In The Books! (2022-10-05T17:06:10Z) - Starchive Founders Meet and Greet (2022-09-27T18:13:18Z) ## Q&A - Q: Hello, thank you for your reply to last question. So it sounds like you are making a bet that the future, firstly, is in video/media rich content and web3; and secondly, that your focus within that will be on the creator economy as opposed to providing corporate or enterprise solutions. Would that be an accurate summary of your vision/business model? And you are hoping that the 80k+ users you have onboarded so far will grow into a significant portion of the 50m+ creator mkt? It sounds from your pitch like you are focused on creators use of starchive for curation, tagging and search -- management of their personal digital assets. But you also allude to use cases by other entities in terms of search of non-personal media, or refinement of general search tags. Is this also something that is from your past incarnation, or an active/potential revenue stream for the future? Will you make available search and tagging (whether personal tagging or universally available for all viewers) on all forms of rich media, such as a sort of widely available Google search, but not just for the written word? And if so, would this be gated, or provision of "service" ala Google? Thank you. - A: Kim San Lee - you ask the best questions. We should do a podcast together so you can draw some of this deep thinking out of me and help me share it! I’ll break your question into parts. Question: So it sounds like you are making a bet that the future, firstly, is in video/media-rich content and web3; and secondly, that your focus within that will be on the creator economy as opposed to providing corporate or enterprise solutions. Would that be an accurate summary of your vision/business model? Answer: In short - yes but there is perhaps a lot to unpack here so let me dive in a bit. Part 1: We believe that rich media in all its forms: audio like podcasts and music, images whether photographs or art, and video or film as a combination of audio and visuals are the most powerful forms of communication and can instantly generate passion, engagement, trust, and more. Media drives culture and culture moves commerce at every scale. Because we believe this is true, we are singularly focused on servicing the creators and creative teams who are the very tip of the spear and have the most acute pain and the biggest opportunity on the line. The lines between an individual and a company or corporation can now be sufficiently blurred as to make them sometimes indistinguishable. Case in point - Mr. Beast. A YouTube phenom with over 100M million subscribers who just expanded his brand to include Mr. Beast Burger joints. In January 2022, Forbes ranked MrBeast as YouTube's highest-earning creator, earning an estimated $54 million in 2021. Though we have some marquee big-name clients including Essence Magazine, OKPOP, The MET, and more, Starchive will not spend our energy trying to win Fortune 100 companies like Pepsi or Capital One as clients. We imagine serving a very broad audience of creative people and teams from the solopreneur all the way to iconic artists like Bob Dylan and any small team inside a major US company who can’t get their work done in an institutional asset management platform. Part 2: We see Web3 as a technology, not unlike the emergence of the Smartphone or 5G or other technological innovations that enable new opportunities. If we look back, we couldn’t have the rich and powerful eCommerce capabilities we have today without the Fintech innovations of the last decade. But eCommerce is not Fintech, it is simply enabled by a robust set of new ways for consumers and companies to exchange cash or credit for goods and services with confidence, trust, and security. Web3 is just shorthand for the future of blockchain-enabled activity on the web. This will include NFTs, and wallet-aware web domains, applications, and new types of quasi-public organizations in the form of DAOs, etc. We believe that this is a transformational technology that will serve to disintermediate the arts and entertainment ecosystem and make it possible for creators to make a quality living with a modest but passionate tribe of fans aka - Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans. Question: And you are hoping that the 80k+ users you have onboarded so far will grow into a significant portion of the 50m+ creator mkt? Answer: Yes, and we are just getting started. We have demonstrated that we can add new users or downloads of Starchive for >$2 each. We expect to accelerate our growth and get >500k new accounts in the next 12 months and focus our energy to show that 3% or more will convert to paying subscribers. This sets us up to be profitable if we choose to bring in growth capital to go even faster. We have a target of 20M users in 5 years or less. Question: It sounds from your pitch like you are focused on creators' use of starchive for curation, tagging and search -- management of their personal digital assets. But you also allude to use cases by other entities in terms of search of non-personal media, or refinement of general search tags. Is this also something that is from your past incarnation, or an active/potential revenue stream for the future? Will you make available search and tagging (whether personal tagging or universally available for all viewers) on all forms of rich media, such as a sort of widely available Google search, but not just for the written word? And if so, would this be gated, or provision of "service" ala Google? Answer: I may need your help with this one. Let me attempt to answer it and you tell me if I have understood you correctly. Starchive will be a key component of the Creator Economy tech stack. We can imagine having a large enough tribe of creators using Starchive that we could explore a Starchive Commons, wherein any Starchive user could opt-in to share or publish selected content from their Starchive to a common portal or even marketplace for aggregated search and discovery but this is not on our current roadmap and it should be clear that Starchive the company would not see this as a means to create revenue from our creators' data or content per se but as a feature for creators to monetize their own content or data as they wish. We serve the owner or creator of any content and their needs. As a Starchive user, none of your data is shared or exposed to the outside world unless you choose to share it. We do not look at your data. We do not sell your data. We do not share your data. Data privacy is a core tenant of ours and we won't break that covenant. (see a new question describing the four key forms of data in detail above.) Ok - I went on for a bit here but I hope I got to the bottom of the great questions you are asking. Hit me up again if you have more! - Q: What about advertising or user subscriptions as ways to monetize? You could share advertising revenue with creators. Also, is there a way for the people consuming the content to pay to subscribe to a certain creator to gain access to their files? This could also be split with the creator. It sounds to me like you are having the creator pay for the subscription and manage the users who have access instead of having the platform monetize the users directly. Can you also go into a little more detail about what is offered for the different subscription levels? - A: Isaac - thanks so much for these great questions and ideas. I’ll break them into parts to make it easy to follow. Q: What about advertising or user subscriptions as ways to monetize? You could share advertising revenue with creators. A: We have no current plans to advertise on Starchive. We see Starchive as a private and secure platform for creators to curate and publish or monetize their content across both web2 and web3 environments. In the past, this has included building documentaries, curating content for licensing, assembling a 16 part CBS series, and publishing content to sell physical works. There is no Starchive “common” channel yet where advertising would be appropriate but that is something we have talked about for the future. We imagine this would be done on our .starchive web3 domain if we determine it is in the service of our creators. That domain would almost certainly be owned and controlled by our community through a DAO and therefore any revenues from that usage would go to the community directly either to support community desires or to be distributed to the creators pro rata. Q: Also, is there a way for the people consuming the content to pay to subscribe to a certain creator to gain access to their files? This could also be split with the creator. A: Not yet, but we are working on it. On our roadmap is the plan to roll out web3 domains for every paid subscriber on our platform. This means you could end up with a Issac@starchive.eth page (or similar) which is wallet aware. Once this is live, you will be able to publish automatically to your web3 domain if you wish from your Starchive simply by selecting the option to make something public. You will have the ability to define tiers of access for content and assign a tier to any individual piece of content. This will allow a creator to give or sell NFT tokens as access passes to your users which will automatically give them access to the right content on your web3 domain. We imagine this as a blockchain backed solution that is Patreon like without having to manage a separate site and with no middleman. Any revenue from these subscriptions will go entirely to the creator less a small percentage or fee for the token creation and the web3 domain management (TBD). We see Starchive as the tech backbone for creators to generate revenue in any way they wish across web2 and web3. Starchive is the hub for a creators files - organized, accessible, and integrated - it is integration ready to all sorts of other non-Starchive monetization channels. In 2023, we expect to add a number of new tight integrations to unlock more direct monetization capabilities. Q: Can you also go into a little more detail about what is offered for the different subscription levels? Tier 1 - FREE - up to 21GB of storage, includes only one member. Unlimited Collections, External sharing, Object A.I. Tier 2 - PLUS Plan $120 (yearly) ($12 monthly) - Includes 2 members w/ additional members billed at $6 month - 1st 100GB of cloud storage is included in the price. Each additional 50GB adds $1 month - EX: An average Starchive: 650 GB cloud storage with 2 extra members (4 members total) will cost $35 (monthly) / $396 (annually) Tier 3 - PREMIUM Starts at $199 month and is largely based on support and services - do you need us to upload, do you need help tagging or use the API directly to build something. Storage is still billed the same but there can be discounts based for multiple Terabytes. In 2023 we'll be introducing a PRO plan with a few new features not included in the current PLUS plan. - Q: Hello, can you kindly provide your LTM rev please? Thank you. Also, can I get your current conversion rate from freemium to paid? Thank you - Q: We want to know what you see your valuation will look like in 3 years also the income and balance statements Not to say much, I think we are very much interested in this project but then we are not opting for the crowdfunding route. We were wondering if you have provisions to accept alternative financing which should save time of WAITING SO LONG for your target to be met. With that we can cover over 50% of your target raise. Kindly reach out to me at thomas@700capital.se so we discuss further. - A: Thomas - I will contact you directly at the email provided. My apologies for not seeing this question sooner. - Q: Question from some DM's (paraphrased): Can you explain the kinds of data Starchive uses to make it easier for a user to find their content and to show the hidden threads that connect our content which we have likely never seen or considered before? - A: We see Metadata (data about data - or in this case, about digital objects or files) as coming in four principal categories. Intrinsic or embedded data: This is the data that is created by the device or platform we are using to create and augment the digital file. This data is embedded in the file record and can be very powerful at times. It comes in many forms such as EXIF, IFDO, IPTC, and many more. Starchive goes looking for every possible data value appended to a digital file, surfaces it for your review, and indexes it for search and auto-curation to help you sort your catalog. AI Data: Starchive is built to use any API addressable AI that is available from any source. Today, we use a simple Object Recognition AI that will tag things like a canoe, an umbrella, a tulip, a pizza, etc. Under the hood, however, we have the ability to use any number of AI engines on demand as we did for Essence Magazine when COVID hit and they had to go virtual with Essence Fest 2020 with only 3 months' notice. We ran 6000+ hours of historical video against an AI Celebrity Engine in just 8 days. You can read the case study from the link on our Campaign page. In the future, we expect to add enhancements to our AI pipeline including Face Detection to group people by identity and Place attribution to put your content on a map and make it searchable by town or city names. We also expect to roll out a pro-tier that would allow a user to choose a group of assets and then select from a menu of AI options to help add more data with less human effort. Human Data: This is the gold standard and we make it possible to add as little or as much as you want in super simple and customizable ways. You can add simple tags to one or more files whenever you want. You can build custom fields in four different types to help refine the data as categories of tags. You can add descriptions as free-flowing prose. Soon, we will allow you to add media data, like a video of you telling the story of a favorite photo as a new form of rich data. While we know there is nothing as valuable as the data in the human mind, we know it is the first place we all shortcut so we want to make it simple for you to add what you can when you can and benefit from it. Blockchain data: This is a new frontier and today is primarily data from Smart Contracts that come with NFTs. Starchive’s native design makes it possible for us to ingest any Smart Contract on any chain of any kind and reflect that data inside your Starchive right alongside the AI data and the human data and the intrinsic data. In fact, as far as we can find, Starchive is the only digital asset management solution in the world doing this today. All the data described above is available to you as a Starchive Owner and anyone you invite and give the right permissions to use in search and auto curation. However, none of this data is shared or exposed to the outside world unless you choose to share it. We do not look at your data. We do not sell your data. We do not share your data. Data privacy is a core tenant of ours and we won't break that covenant. - Q: Thank you Richard! I am getting my MBA from USC and am taking an investing in new ventures class. Would you be open to a phone conversation and sharing more information I could conduct due diligence on? - A: Absolutely Haley! Let's book a call here if that is okay with you. https://calendly.com/starchive/20min-starchive-intro-call - Q: What is your current amount to raise (fundraising goal)? - A: Hello Haley - Please pardon me for being slow to respond. I missed the notice that we had a new question. We have set a fundraising goal of $500k in total with a minimum threshold of $250k. We want to be sure that anyone who wants in from our community has a chance to participate. We will be sending out a notice to all 85k account holders in the next few days. Let me know if you have any other questions or want to talk directly. - Q: Hello, who are some of your direct competitors? What makes you different/better/competitive advantages over companies like Clipr or Axle AI? You mention that you have raised over 5.7m from VC previously? Can you provide more information on this and any other previous funding rounds please -- there is no "details" tab in drop down menu, no MD&A, etc. Thank you. - A: Kim San LEE - Apologies for being a touch slow to get you this reply - I wanted to be sure we thoroughly answered your great questions. I have not used either Clipr or Axle AI before and both look like great products. Clearly, both are primarily focused on video and the use of AI on video for faster indexing search and editing. To contrast, Starchive is designed to manage any file type in any size and format: from 8k footage to your next TikTok video, from multi-track audio to mp3s, from massive composite images to simple iphone photos, and even documents and contracts and spreadsheets that relate to the content or complete the story of your brand and your life. Starchive excels on two key fronts as compared to any other content management platform: the visual; experience and the data layer. VISUAL: Every file is transcoded to a web-enabled streamable preview and a thumbnail so you can quickly validate that you have found what you are looking for and have world-class capability to stream and share even massive files and/or formats that are not otherwise available via browser or mobile. DATA: Starchive uses every bit of embedded metadata inside the file or attached to the file (including a smart contract on the blockchain). This data often tells a rich story and will help you find the thing you are looking for. Starchive also connects every file at the data level so that you can quickly explore all the hidden connections in your content. On top of that, we add AI to assist you with tagging and Starchive has unique capabilities for you to create your own data schema with custom fields that support the way you think and want to sort your media. While there is much more to say on this topic, it is important to highlight that Starchive is the only asset management system available that natively lets you manage your on-chain content and your off-chain content, mint NFTs, and will be directly connected to metaverses and web3 domains to leverage all the new capabilities blockchain innovations can provide. For all of these reasons, we believe that the total market size for Starchive is far broader than these related products. On the fundraising: We have indeed raised a total of $5.7M since 2015 when we first formed the parent company Digital ReLab, LLC (dba Starchive). You don’t yet see all the financials and previous raise details on WeFunder because we are undergoing a thorough audit in order to file our Form C and share all of those details with you when they have been certified by a third party. We can split the company history into two buckets. From 2015-2019, we worked under the name Digital ReLab, LLC and we had two products (Starchive and Lens). The company was then focused on major artists and archives and provided both services and software. During this time we raised a total of $3M. In 2019, we reframed the company to focus on serving a much broader global audience. We raised $1.3M and reduced the team to the bare bones and rebuilt our software for nearly two years. In 2021, Starchive was finally ready for prime time and we relaunched the company with only one product and rebranded to Starchive. The very last raise was a SAFE note in July 2021 for $1.4M on a $10M cap, designed to provide the resources we needed to integrate with wallets, mint nfts, and focus on growth. Since then, we have grown from under 5,000 accounts to more than 84,000 today and we are now web3 enabled with lots of new capabilities on the horizon. Hopefully, this will help provide some clarity. Happy to answer more questions. - Q: Here is the question we often get asked: With your current trajectory and traction – why is Starchive crowdfunding? - A: Our mission has always been to empower creators and innovators, and we believe that crowdfunding is a powerful way to do just that. It gives our community an investment opportunity they would normally never get, and it allows us yet another method to tightly align our interests with our community of users and empower our fellow creators.