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Tribe announces US launch off the back of a $10.5m capital raise

Microinfluencer platform Tribe has today announced it will launch in the US, with headquarters in New York City’s One World Trade Center.

The expansion is funded by the startup’s recent $10.5m capital raise.

CEO Anthony Svirskis and founder Jules Lund

Founder Jules Lund told Mumbrella that the past three and a half years have “felt like practice for these moments”.

“Moving into the UK, that’s overtaken Australia, that’s absolutely flying. So to be able to raise this money to actually take what we’ve been working on for years in terms of technology and roll it out into the States, it really is exciting,” he said.

Previously, when discussing expansion, CEO Anthony Svirskis told Mumbrella that Tribe didn’t “want very mature markets, so the US would probably be out”.

When asked what’s changed, Lund explained that Tribe was effectively “pulled into North America” by its customers.

“When we looked into our data last year, it turned out that 20% of all of our campaigns were coming from North American marketers and 25% of all of our app downloads were from North American creators … and we had zero market presence,” Lund said.

“They were having an unoptimised experience, because we weren’t even there in a support role. We just had to respond to the data.”

Founded in 2015 by Lund, a TV and radio personality, Tribe allows brands such as Facebook, Unilever and Mars to post a brief for influencers through the platform. Influencers then buy the product (if they don’t already own it), create the content and upload it for consideration, competing with other submissions. The content creator sets the price, Tribe adds a 30% service fee, and if the brand likes the content, it buys it. There’s no obligation for brands to approve (and therefore pay for) any of the hundreds of submissions influencers send in.

Tribe says more than $250,000 worth of branded content is generated per day by its network of 50,000 influencers, translating into 20,000 pieces of content per month.

“We’re yet to find anyone who can compete globally with that,” Lund said.

“Our microinfluencers spend, on average, 26 minutes a day in the app, which is an extraordinary metric for an influencer marketplace.

“We’ve never cared about the vanity metric of how many are in our community. We actually only need as many creators as we have demand. There’s no point in us, like others around the globe, having a database of 10 million if none of those people are engaged.”

The recent capital raise will also be used to invest in Tribe’s product department. The platform has more than 70 employees located in five cities across the globe, with approximately 40 of those from the product department, which Lund says must be scaled.

“We’ve got huge plans for this year in terms of what we’re building out, and the features on our roadmap, and so if we can expand the team, we can basically get ahead of the market even further,” he said.

Lund told Mumbrella that around eight staff members will be based in the One World Trade Center office, situated on the 85th floor, within the next couple of months. He also said that the location will act as an impressive space to hold events for American content creators and brands.

Tribe has worked with 6,000 brands and has a network of 50,000 influencers

Earlier this year, Tribe launched a content marketplace, where brands can browse and buy content on demand, rather than issuing a specific brief.

“Tribe’s product will continue to evolve,” said Svirskis, who will oversee the US operations.

“We’ve added a managed service to our product suite to assist brands and agencies on larger spending campaigns, and we now have the tools to build ongoing relationships with influencers across multiple campaigns.”

Tribe’s presence in the One World Trade Center will add to its existing network of offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Manila and London.

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