FanBridge, a startup that helps everyone from rock groups to businesses manage their fan relationships, made two big announcements this week: the closing of a $2 million Series A round of financing and the acquisition of Damntheradio.
The Series A was stacked with some prominent investor names, including Alex Zubillaga (Rhone Group), Chris Fralic (First Round Capital), Founder Collective, 500 Startups, Maurice Werdegar, and Matt Keiser (Grape Arbor VC). FanBridge’s seed supporters–Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), Chris Sacca (LowerCase Capital), Founders Fund and Dave McClure–invested $350,000 in FanBridge in March 2009.
With the acquisition of Damntheradio, a Facebook-based fan management startup, FanBridge has added all three of the company’s founders (Johnny Hwin, AJ Magnuson, and Nick Lane-Smith) to the FanBridge team. The acquisition is also noteworthy because Damntheradio has already built up a noteworthy list of clients that inclues the likes of Warner Music Group, American Idol, Gatorade, Sony Music, EMI, Tapulous, Linkin Park and more.
Musicians, businesses and whoever else might have fans can use FanBridge to attract more fans and keep them engaged. That can involve anything from offering incentives like free songs to monitoring analytics data to create virality to keeping fans updated with SMS or email notifications.
Price points for premium plans–Stadium, Coliseum and “World Tour”–match their respective daily limits for messaging fans. The first allows for 50,000 messages per month for $50 per month, the second does 100,000 for $100 and the last does 250,000 for $250. FanBridge also offers three less expensive plans and one free option, so potential clients really have a lot of room in deciding the one that best fits their purposes.
Because FanBridge is still very much in its early stages, I wouldn’t expect any of these price points to be set in stone.
Part of the new funding will go to new hires, as well, with ten open positions currently listed in both New York (at FanBridge’s headquarters) and San Francisco (at Damntheradio) for predominantly technology and business development categories. There’s also a Web development position open in Buenos Aires, Argentina, interestingly enough.
