Contact, a platform for creatives backed by Maisie Williams, raises $1.9M seed led by Founders Fund
Summary
And yet, managing your professional life as a model, actor, writer or designer remains a mish-mash of emails, manual booking processes and dreaded PDFs. Contact co-founder and CEO Reuben Selby a fashion designer who was formerly of Williams founding team, when she started her career has worked with Nike, Thom Browne and JW Anderson. After finding scant methods for secure and safe ways to get paid -- while booking companies lacked basic technological tools -- he realized that "middle-men" and agencies were the main players that benefitted, taking cuts on both sides and often still delivering a sub-par product.So how does Contact work?When a Creator joins, they are able to showcase their portfolio across different creative services and take direct bookings.A business can then browse and discover talent using filters, shortlist creative talent, provide details about the job and book creators directly. Once the job has been completed, the talent gets paid out via Contact.Since soft-launching within the modeling vertical, Contact says it has onboarded almost 600 creatives and over 1,400 clients, including Depop, Farfetch, Nike, Vivienne Westwood and Vogue. So there was a clear alignment.Talking about the other angel investors in the round he said: People like Eric and Simon are majorly connected in fashion and music culture in general.Speaking about how the entertainment industry might react to Contact, Williams said: Actors have many other things that they do.