Alexandra Debow was building a photo-sharing app for sorority girls when she accidentally stumbled into a $200 billion industry’s biggest blind spot.
The 24-year-old Thiel Fellow is the founder and CEO of Swsh—a fan engagement platform for live experiences. The company raised a $4 million seed round, Fortune has exclusively learned. Game Changers Ventures led the round, with participation from Stellation Capital, SignalFire, and MaC Venture Capital. The angels include Scooter Braun, Guy Oseary, Morning Brew‘s Austin Rief, and GGV’s Hans Tung.
Swsh launched in 2022 as a shared photo album for college campuses—sororities, frat parties, anyone who wanted to find photos of themselves from the night before. But users kept dragging the app somewhere Swsh hadn’t planned for: “Over the weekends they’d create albums and bring them to sports events and artist events,” Debow told me. “We realized it wasn’t just the fan who really enjoyed this—it was also the brand, the business, the artist. They want to connect with their fans.”
So, Debow flipped the model: the consumer front end stays fan-first, but the back end now sells to Sony, Warner, UMG, and “hundreds of artists” who deploy Swsh on tour and collect all the content fans upload. The $5.9 billion fan engagement platform market alone is projected to reach 25.4 billion by 2034.
What Swsh collects is Debow’s suspected goldmine. Brands and artists leave live events with almost no structured data about who was in the room (meanwhile, Live Nation reported 159 million fans globally in 2025). Swsh routes fan-captured photos and videos into AI-parsed media libraries that can identify sponsor logos in crowd shots, merchandise people were wearing, even demographic patterns by time of night. “It’s basically having 100,000 documentary filmmakers capturing exactly what happened,” Debow said.
The obvious question is legal. AI photo discovery—the tool that lets fans instantly find photos of themselves across thousands of uploads—has generated billions in class-action liability lawsuits under state biometric privacy laws for companies larger than Swsh. Debow’s answer is structural: every upload triggers an explicit, plain-English consent screen—rights ownership, commercial use, the works—and fans can’t upload without agreeing. Each organizational partner also gets its own content review workflow, where uploads can be held in a waiting room before going live.
Debow’s broader argument is that the entire marketing industry is mid-pivot. SEO was gamed. Influencers lost the room.
“There’s a degradation of trust,” she told me. “People don’t trust one brief photo from a Taylor Swift concert. You trust seeing 20,000 videos in your feed.”
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
– Hydra Host, a Miami, Fla.-based AI infrastructure company, raised $100 million in Series A funding. Kindred Ventures led the round and was joined by NVIDIA, ARK Invest, SPLY Capital, and others.
– NewCore, a Tel Aviv, Israel and San Francisco-based security-first identity platform for human workers, machines, and AI agents, raised $66 million in funding from Cyberstarts, Index Ventures, and Evolution Equity Partners.
– Arcade.dev, a San Francisco-based secure action layer that governs what production AI agents can do inside enterprise systems, raised $60 million in Series A funding. SYN Ventures led the round and was joined by Morgan Stanley and Wipro.
– Podium Automation, a Brooklyn, N.Y.C.-based control cabinet manufacturer, raised $18 million in Series A funding. Construct Capital led the round and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, and Banter Capital.
– Luni, a Bordeaux, France-based mobile app studio, raised $14 million in funding from PvX Partners.
– Cortea, a Berlin, Germany-based developer of AI agents for professional audits, raised €12 million ($13.9 million) in seed funding. Dawn Capital led the round and was joined by Cherry Ventures, Mosaic Ventures, Larry Bradley, and others.
– Nox Metals, a Detroit, Mich.-based metals service center, raised $11.5 million in seed funding. Hyperion led the round and was joined by Operator Collective, Y Combinator, Palmer Luckey, and others.
– Dioseve, a Tokyo, Japan and Palo Alto, Calif.-based fertility biotech company, raised $7 million in a Series A extension. Archetype Ventures led the round and was joined by Shionogi, Pangaea Ventures, D4V, DG Daiwa Ventures, and Mirai Creation Fund.
PRIVATE EQUITY
– GALT Aerospace, backed by Godspeed Capital, acquired North Star Scientific Corporation, a Kapolei, Hawaii-based designer and manufacturer of defense electronics and radar systems. Financial terms were not disclosed.
– Hoffman Family of Companies acquired Cedar Crest Ice Cream, a Cedarburg, Wis.-based dairy business. Financial terms were not disclosed.
– Residence, a portfolio company of Gemspring Capital, acquired GateMaker, a Miami, Fla.-based influencer marketing agency. Financial terms were not disclosed.
EXITS
– THL Partners acquired Celerion Holdings, a Lincoln, Neb.-based clinical pharmacology and bioanalytical sciences company, from H.I.G. Capital for $1.8 billion.
IPOS
– Doncasters Group, a Derbyshire, U.K.-based manufacturer of metal and alloy components for aerospace engines, plans to raise up to $745.6 million in an offering of 23.3 million shares priced between $28 and $32 on the New York Stock Exchange. The company posted $886 million in sales for the year ended March 31. J F Lehman, Searchlight Opportunities, Hill City Capital, UBS, Lord Abbett & Co, Bardin Hill, Mudrick Capital Management, Corre Opportunities Fund, and Kinetic Partners back the company.
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