Fanhaven 🎤

Opening Remarks

This week, I've been thinking about the role belief plays in entrepreneurship. Before customers, investors, or employees believe in a vision, the founder has to believe in it themselves. Every great company starts with a founder who's willing to act as if the future they're building is inevitable, even when there's little evidence to support it.

One of my favorite stories illustrates this perfectly. I wrote about it recently. Check it out here. Now, onto this week's feature:

-Brett

Bulletpitch’s publication covers the hottest early-stage startups before being picked up by larger media outlets. If that’s you, apply here.

Setting the Scene

• Every year, millions of fans buy merchandise at concerts, but most remain anonymous after checkout.

• Without fan identity, artists can't effectively re-engage customers, forecast demand, or measure marketing ROI.

• Existing point-of-sale systems process payments, not customer relationships.

• As a result, artists keep paying to reacquire fans they’ve already earned.

• This week’s company turns every merch transaction into a verified fan record that artists can own, retarget, and monetize.

In a Sentence

Fanhaven is building the identity layer for live entertainment by turning merchandise purchases into first-party customer data.

• Identity Layer: Connects each merchandise purchase to a persistent fan profile instead of treating every transaction as anonymous.

• Data: Combines contact information and purchase behavior into a customer record that artists own and can use to personalize marketing and merchandising.

The Basics

• Industry: Entertainment, POS, Data

• Headquarters: Los Angeles

• Year Founded: 2024

• Employee Count: 4

• Investors: Boost VC, Linda Mar Ventures, and various angels

• Amount Raised: $760,000

• Business Model: Take rate on payment processing

• Early Traction: $150k processed since the launch in March and a contract with a merch company bringing on 60 more active touring artists

Event Board

• Founder and Investor Dinner, NYC: We’re hosting an intimate dinner for top-tier founders and investors on September 16th in NYC! Apply HERE.

• Founder and Investor Dinner, SF: We’re hosting one of our signature founder dinners in SF on October 5th! Apply HERE.

• Founder and Investor Dinner, LA: We’re hosting one of our signature founder dinners in LA on October 14th! Apply HERE.

Weekly Feature Continued

Due Diligence

WHAT WE LIKE

• Large and Under-Digitized Market: Live entertainment generates hundreds of millions in merchandise sales annually, yet customer identity remains largely disconnected from the point of purchase, creating an opportunity to become foundational infrastructure.

• Aligned Incentives: Artists currently waste 40-60% of all produced merch, giving Fanhaven a natural wedge to improve forecasting while building valuable fan profiles.

• Potential Data Moat. If Fanhaven becomes the system of record for fan identity, its proprietary graph could become increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate as network effects compound.

POTENTIAL RISKS

• Scalability: Winning the market requires displacing deeply embedded POS providers and convincing artists that identity capture is worth changing operational workflows.

• Incumbents: Incumbents such as Square could integrate identity features into their existing payment infrastructure before Fanhaven reaches meaningful scale.

• Beyond Enrichment: Long-term enterprise value depends on proving that first-party fan data translates into measurable increases in artist revenue, not simply richer customer profiles.

Founder Profile

• Kaden Bishop, CEO: Previously the director of The Save It Forward Initiative.

• Cole Marston, COO: Previously a fellow at the Startup Village.

• Bereket Semagn, CTO: Previously a founding engineer at Tunnel, co-founder of Butler.

Comps

• Jump: Fan platform for sports that connects ticketing, identity, and in-venue engagement, while Fanhaven builds a broader entertainment identity graph by capturing large volumes of merch buyers first and enriching profiles over time.

• Equipe: Customer data platform for professional and college sports that unifies existing data into complete customer records, while Fanhaven captures new fan identities directly through live-event merch transactions.

• atVenu: Live-event platform for POS, inventory, and settlements; Fanhaven differentiates by incorporating verified fan identity and post-purchase activation into every transaction.

Cast Your Vote

Last Week Today

• The Results Are In: Yank Tech, a company building long-range, high-powered wireless charging systems for robots, vehicles, defense equipment, and space hardware, was the favorite in last week's poll.

• Subscriber Feedback: “The product seems like it has great potential since it targets environments where downtime, exposed connectors, and failed charging can create real operational risk.”