Upon graduation from college, three friends with a shared passion for music banded together to form a business with one objective: to use online data to identify future music icons. Founded in 2015 by Keshav Garg, CEO (center); Connor Lawrence, CCO (left); and Matthew Pavia, CTO (right), proprietary-data platform indify uses listener data, social metrics, and online trends —with a collection of extensive data points from SoundCloud, YouTube, and Twitter—to rank and analyze up-and-coming artists. After winning a $10,000 grant from Colgate University last spring via a Shark Tank-like mock competition featuring a group of panelists, including Jessica Alba and MC Hammer, the three 22-year-olds, all Scarsdale High School grads, have developed a fully functional data platform that ranks more than 100,000 emerging artists based upon their chances of future success. The fledgling service has drawn the interest of more than 150 industry contacts, from major record labels and streaming services to media agencies. “By taking into account key modern metrics, indify has the potential to turn any DIY artist into a superstar, and the platform has the unique ability to connect artists with the opportunity to be heard by the masses,” says Lawrence.
Wunderfacts:
• indify, which is in a beta stage right now, is being offered to businesses on a trialbasis to test it. Once it is fully tested, it will open for subscription for a planned summer 2016 release.
• All three founders graduated from college in May 2015 and have since been in Scarsdale, working on indify full-time. Lawrence graduated from Marist College; Garg graduated from Colgate University; Pavia graduated from Lehigh University.
• In addition to the grant from the “Shark Tank” competition, the founders won $15,000 from the Thought Into Action Entrepreneurship Institute ENY Fund and were admitted into the Thought Into Action Entrepreneurship Incubator for a summer session (May to July 2015).
