Networking is at the heart of show business, no matter what facet of the industry someone works in. For those operating the camera, orchestrating costume changes, setting audio levels or hanging the spotlights that make our favorite stars shine, Impact wants to help them connect with one another and book their next project. The company announced a $15 million capital raise on Monday to build out its online network.
Impact developed an online network for crew talent in the TV and film industry. The Tinseltown-based tech company was co-founded by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, two Academy Award-winning filmmakers. The company is headed by CEO Tyler Mitchell, a producer and writer who was previously the executive vice president of motion pictures at Imagine Entertainment.
Impact’s solution offers tools to help production team members collaborate and connect with each other and enable industry producers to hire talent faster, increase inclusivity and finish daily projects sooner.
“There’ve been so many incredible technological advances over the years in digital effects, cameras, editing and streaming, but the actual mounting and producing of shows hasn’t evolved and can’t keep up with the growing demand,” Howard said in a statement. “We hope that Impact will make the hard-working crews’ jobs a little easier and allow productions to run a bit smoother and maybe even wrap days earlier.”
The company’s platform has more than 400,000 crew profiles in its database that are free for professionals to claim. After they take ownership of their profile, users can update their production credits, denote their skills, connect with current and past colleagues as well as find crew members for future productions.
Since its founding in 2020, Impact has helped more than 60 productions around the world source crews for movies and shows. Members of its network have collaborated on projects broadcasted to platforms like Apple TV+, Universal, Disney+, Netflix and Hulu.
With the new capital from lead investor Shasta Ventures, Impact will expand its team across product and engineering. Its goal is to launch new platform features to serve crew members and help streamline production challenges.
“Entertainment is a network-driven industry that does not have an online network. With production spending continuing to break global records and $4.6 billion being invested to build new studios and hundreds of state-of-the-art sound stages around the world, now is the time for us to accelerate our development of network-driven features that will connect the industry,” Mitchell said in a statement. “Our network will provide more opportunities for crew, real-time visibility into the available workforce and facilities for studios and producers and tools designed to save people the most valuable commodity in the industry — time.”
