Music startup Sesh began with a question: How do we help artists connect with fans outside social media? While some musicians are natural influencers, others are bad at TikTok, or just don’t want to spend time there.
“Artists are not content creators,” Sesh’s CEO Pepe del Río told Business Insider. “They create music and they like to perform.”
At its core, Sesh is a platform for artists to stay in touch with fans and manage data about their audiences.
When users sign up to follow an artist on Sesh, they provide information like their age, location, and email. In exchange, they get notifications about album releases and other drops, the ability to chat with an artist or other fans during live sessions in the Sesh app, and an official “fan card” for that artist that lives in their mobile wallet (on iOS or Android), among other features.
Sesh’s artist roster includes pop stars like Anitta, Sofia Reyes, and the Black Eyed Peas.
The company makes money by charging artists and their teams a monthly fee to use the platform. In the future, Sesh also plans to take a cut of fan transactions it helps facilitate.
The company closed a $5 million seed round in September led by investment firm Miura Global. It’s raised $7 million to date, including pre-seed funding from angel investors. Del Río’s cofounders include Iñigo-Hubertus Bunzl Pelayo (COO), María José Guzman (CMO), and Andrés Fajardo (CPTO).
Sesh is positioning itself as a superfan platform, tapping into a buzzy area of the music business and broader creator economy. The company is playing in a crowded marketplace of fandom startups, including text-marketing tools like Community, membership apps like Patreon, and music album drop platforms like Laylo.
So, how did Sesh differentiate itself to investors in its most recent fundraise?
- It uses mobile wallet “fan cards”
Ultimately, the company wants its users not to feel tethered to a particular app, but instead follow an artist no matter where they are posting content. That’s where the mobile wallet “fan card” comes in.
“When you talk about a community app, normally an investor will look at you and say, ‘Who the f—k is going to download a community app,'” del Río said.
The wallet card, by contrast, is simple to download and a useful tool for artists to send push notifications to fans, he said. Music fans are already accustomed to keeping concert tickets in their mobile wallets, so why not get artist updates there, too?
- It’s positioning itself as a data company
Investors often bet on startups with a smart data story, and Sesh is positioning itself as a data company that allows artists to track fan analytics and spot trends that can help them make money from their audiences.
- Sesh’s founders are bullish on AI and want to keep their team small
At a moment when Big Tech executives are weighing whether to use AI to reduce their company’s head count, new startups can make bets from the start on how automation will impact their team’s size.
Del Río said he doesn’t want to grow his team any bigger than it needs to be, and that AI is already helping the company work more efficiently (which investors appreciate) in areas like coding and marketing.
Read the pitch deck that Sesh used to raise its seed round:
Note: Two slides were removed that contained information about the company’s clients in order to share the deck publicly.
It opens with a title slide
The superfan opportunity
Sesh combined data from Nielsen, Live Nation Entertainment, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, among other sources, to provide some top-level estimates of the market opportunity.
This slide reads:
Artists struggle to manage and monetize their fan communities, while fans crave deeper connections
$14.6BN unrealized fans higher spending
$15.4BN wasted chasing fans the old way
+80% of total expenditure comes from superfans
There are millions of artists to recruit
Sesh estimated that music industry fan communities are a $34.5 billion market opportunity. It wrote that 15% of the population are superfans, and that there are 25 million music artists (250,000 full-time music artists).
This slide reads:
A large, underserved market of artists and fans without a space to connect
Weverse, the K-pop-focused fan platform, has demonstrated the power and profitability of fan-driven ecosystems in music. By applying a similar model to the vastly larger Latin and U.S. markets, we see a clear path to building a $1B+ business.
An all-in-one ecosystem for optimizing and managing fan communities
How an artist can sign up fans
This slide reads:
Artists share a trackable link; fans join in seconds and save a member card to their phone wallet for direct updates. They can also join the app community to connect and engage in gamified spaces around the artist.
How an artist can message to fans
This slide reads:
Artists launch unlimited campaigns with custom claims and tracking. Reach fans via email, wallet push notifications, and in-app session, all powered by real-time insights.
A customer-relationship management tool for artists
This slide reads:
All fan data lives in one place. Our AI helps artists understand their audience, fan behavior, and how to engage them effectively.
The business model
Sesh makes money from monthly fees collected from artists and their teams, and plans to take a cut of the fan spend it helps facilitate.
The company estimates it could generate $200 million annually if it had 10,000 active artist communities.
The Sesh growth playbook
This slide highlights how Sesh plans to expand its customer set, and how different aspects of its business help other areas grow, generally referred to as a business flywheel.
It reads:
Industry presence: Create awareness by appearing in top music focused events and outlets
Partnerships: Partner with key industry players (e.g. labels) that work alongside artists
Ambassadors: Target recognized artists as advocators to foster virality
A new artist creates a community on Sesh. The community is shared on social media by both the artist and their fans. This drives organic growth — more fans join communities, and more artists join Sesh.
Sesh’s founding team
Sesh is built by a “seasoned team of 11 seshmates with deep industry expertise, headquartered in LA,” the company says.
This slide features photos of each of its four cofounders, with QR codes that link to their LinkedIn pages:
Pepe Del Río, cofounder and CEO
Iñigo-Hubertus Bunzl Pelayo, cofounder and COO
María José Guzman, cofounder and CMO
Andrés Fajardo, cofounder and CPTO
The broader opportunity beyond music
This slide reads:
“At Sesh, we’re building the infrastructure powering next-gen fan communities. An ecosystem where people don’t just follow what they love — they belong to it. Where connection runs deeper than content, and identity is shaped by shared passion. Music is our entry point — the heartbeat of culture — but the opportunity is much bigger: to build a global infrastructure for belonging. One that spans sports, lifestyle, creators, brands — anything people want to belong to. We’re building the connective tissue of the next cultural era.”
The closing slide calls the company the ‘best kept secret for fan communities’
