Gil Eyal

And what I realized was that I was paying a lot to get

200 celebrities on my platform.

And most, 90% of their audience was never the audience I was trying to reach.

And that's a big issue.

That's what led to the birth of Piper because I realized everybody's gonna be wanting to activate these younger, these smaller influencers, these social media stars.

And if they don't know who the audience is and what they're interested in, a lot of money's going to go to waste.

We've raised about $8 million so far.

I think the issue with Raising With Celebrities was that it created a lot of attention for the company at a stage where it wasn't ready for it.

We were driving.

We built an app.

We were a bunch of people who built an app and didn't expect to get 20 million downloads over a three or four month period.

And we couldn't handle it.

The app was crashing.

It wasn't good enough.

Instagram had popped up.

There were better alternatives.

So the publicity that comes with these big celebrities is great, but it was the wrong audience that wasn't staying on the app.

And it was too much for us to handle as a company.

We decided to go traditional venture capital route with Hyper because we didn't think it would benefit from a relationship to celebrities.

We didn't want to be associated with the influencer.