Today is an exciting day! As covered by Axios this morning, I’m thrilled to share with you the next step in Tagboard’s journey as we have secured $8M in Series A funding from a tremendous group of investors. The round is being co-led by Grayhawk Capital and Next Frontier Capital, with strategic investments from Sinclair Broadcast Group and WISE Ventures.
We will use this round to accelerate growth for the company, which now serves as a cloud-based production platform for more than 600 of the world’s top media brands across news, sports, and entertainment. As increased content options are dividing viewership, Tagboard continues to capitalize on the growing need to drive efficiency and impact for our key media partners including Sinclair Broadcast Group, NFL Media, FOX Sports, TEGNA, Turner Sports, CNN, Riot Games, and Major League Baseball, among others.
“When we launched Tagboard in 2011, we couldn’t have imagined the full evolution of our platform to where we are today,” said Tagboard Founder and Chairman Josh Decker. “Our original vision was to create a universal way to search, aggregate and share real-time social content. Fast forward to today and we have become the preferred cloud production software for major media organizations – powering the production of stories, sports and news broadcasts around the world.”
Solving Problems in the Media Industry
The hard truth for media organizations today is they face increased competition and pressure to produce content that drives competitive viewership, measurable engagement, and ad revenue, all while working with tighter budgets, time, and resources. As the sheer number of options has the attention of viewers spread thinner across linear and digital broadcasts, networks not only need to experiment with new interactive content formats to better engage viewers across channels, they also have an imperative to produce stories in a more efficient and impactful way.
Tagboard removes the complexity and cost of legacy production hardware, empowering producers to create shows from anywhere in the world, whether they are traveling abroad, working from home, or in the broadcast studio.
Our partnership announcement with NBC Sports last week is a perfect example. As one of the largest media organizations in the world, NBC Sports partnered with Tagboard to produce interactive segments in linear and livestream coverage of the Winter Olympics including graphics, polls and real-time social content – all able to be easily produced from fully-remote global locations.
“Tagboard was built from the ground up to help media organizations solve their biggest production challenges,” said Sherman Chu, Founder & Managing Partner at Grayhawk Capital. “What began as a platform for surfacing live social content to include in stories has quickly become the production platform of choice for major media networks, generating massive efficiencies by helping them to move their graphics systems into the cloud. We are thrilled to co-lead this investment round and the multitude of opportunities that Tagboard has as it rolls out its planned innovation roadmap.”
Empowering the Next Generation of Producers
In contrast to competing solutions, Tagboard prides itself on ease of use, where within an hour of training, anyone from an intern to an experienced producer can create custom graphics on the fly, integrate real-time social content across major platforms, or launch interactive campaigns through QR and polling technology. Legacy technologies can take months of training to learn and integrating real-time data sources can take entire engineering teams.
“The next generation of producers expects production to be as easy as content creation on Instagram or TikTok,” said Will Price, Founder & Managing Partner at Next Frontier Capital. “Tagboard is delivering that ease of use to media partners, bringing crowd-sourced, real-time content and data-driven graphics together in an intuitive platform built by producers, for producers. We couldn’t be more excited to co-lead this investment round and look forward to partnering with Tagboard as they execute on their vision with partners to redefine the future of cloud production and storytelling.”
“Tagboard has been a key partner of Sinclair for many years, and we’re thrilled to support them as they enhance their product suite to power real-time, interactive storytelling on all platforms,” said Scott Livingston, VP, News at Sinclair Broadcast Group. “Viewers expect to have a voice in the news, and Tagboard allows producers to quickly customize graphic presentations, live data, and interactive experiences for any audience or story without requiring new hardware or changing workflows. That level of flexibility is critical as live production continues to move beyond the four walls of traditional control rooms and the number of distribution platforms expands.”
Millions of Stories Produced with Stronger Engagement
In 2021, media partners produced more than 20 million stories using Tagboard, with an average of 1,200 graphics incorporated into stories each day. In addition to major media partners, Tagboard also works with 21 NFL clubs including its longest-standing client, the Minnesota Vikings, who helped intrigue WISE Ventures to join the round.
“The Tagboard team has done a phenomenal job working with the Minnesota Vikings over several years and we could not be happier with the product or the team,” said Jonathan Wilf, Partner at WISE Ventures. “Tagboard is a clear market leader in creating interactive live programming to engage with the next generation of fans. We look forward to working with Nathan and his team to drive new product features and expand into additional verticals.”
Investing in Our Growth with New Leadership Hires
With our Series A funding, Tagboard will continue to accelerate product development and go-to-market activities, while expanding our team. We are thrilled to have added several key leadership hires including Joesph Tripp, Chief Revenue Officer; Kirk Dickinson, Chief Financial Officer and Linka Baumgardt, Chief Strategy Officer. I’m also excited to share that I will be joining our Board of Directors alongside Sherman Chu of Grayhawk Capital and Will Price of Next Frontier Capital with Tagboard Founder & President Josh Decker leading as Chair of the Board.
Simply put, Tagboard has evolved over the last 5 years to become something far more profound than any of us could have imagined. Today our cloud graphics and production software enables media executives to run their operations more efficiently than ever before, all while supporting their producers to create millions of stories watched by billions of people around the world.
To Our Supporters
I am beyond thankful to our current investors, especially Keshif Ventures, for their years of support.
I’m honored to welcome our new investors and thank them for choosing to back our team, mission, and vision for the future of production.
To our clients and partners – thank you for your years of partnership, challenging us, and championing us along the way; we are only getting started.
A standing ovation for our Founder & President, Josh, who sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears to see this company thrive.
And finally, to Team Tagboard, including our alumni: You ALL had an impact on where we are today. I came to Tagboard because of the high quality character of the people, and we’ve kept that core principal in tact over the years to where I can say that today’s team is a collection of some of the most brilliant, fun, talented, and driven individuals I’ve ever met, so if you are a shareholder you should be damn proud and excited for this next leg of our journey. I know we are.
And now the hard work resumes, team. Up and to the right we go.
– Nate
To learn more about Tagboard and how our platform can help power your content production, visit www.tagboard.com
