Why We Invested: Tagboard

Changing the world isn’t easy. We get it.

At WestRiver Group we are a collection of builders, operators, investors, and risk takers; willing to think outside the box and challenge the status quo. Show us how you intend to disrupt a complacent industry dominated by old and bloated incumbents to create a new multi-billion-dollar category of products or services and we’re all ears.

Late last year I reconnected with Tagboard, a company I was originally introduced to back in 2017 by co-founders Josh Decker and Jenni Hogan. The business back then was built around delivering real-time social media content to prominent public screens – stadium displays, digital signage and storytelling on local news stations - to give context to what was happening around the specific event or community in general. 

The mere idea of placing real-time social media posts within live content environments was a very risky proposition at the time. Having spent more than a decade in the broadcast and digital media space, I know first-hand how tightly controlled live environments can be and the liability broadcasters, brands, and leagues face if the wrong content gets delivered to their audiences. However, producers had been starting to embrace the idea of tying social content into traditional public media channels to drive better engagement. They just needed a trusted partner who could not only handle the media injection but also manage the curation of this content so not just anything made it onto live TV or the jumbotron at your local stadium. 

Tagboard became that trusted partner, delivering what other legacy systems were not equipped to provide and, in the process, set the standard for delivering rich digital content into traditional, non-digital environments. Over the course of the next few years, Tagboard became the de facto standard for companies and brands to leverage social media content within broadcast television productions.

As its customer base grew, the Tagboard team became acutely aware of the growing limitations within legacy production systems and centralized control centers comprised of expensive hardware, with little to no capability for remote management. This, of course, represented a compelling opportunity to develop a better way for media producers to manage their content creation and delivery workflows.

The Tagboard thesis: the days of bulky, hardware-based systems must give way to more agile, cloud-based systems that support today’s distributed workforce. 

The result was the development and launch of Tagboard Producer, a game-changing cloud-based solution that offered simple drag-and-drop workflows for media production. Tagboard Producer went live in 2018 and supported Turner Sports during that year’s March Madness event. This was followed by the launch of Tagboard Graphics, a fully-integrated graphic-design platform, in 2020 which took cloud-based media production to the next level and was on full display for the 2020 NFL Draft.

Today, under the leadership of newly appointed CEO Nathan Peterson, Tagboard has 40 employees supporting some of the world’s best known content producers from NFL, MLB and NBA to ABC, FOX, Warner Media, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and others. As we got to know Nathan and his team, we quickly learned that Tagboard’s impressive performance has been driven not just by its technology and go-to-market strategy, but by its equally impressive team. Their focus and drive to be the leader in a market we estimate will exceed $63B is evidenced not only by their historic growth but by the faith and trust placed in them by their customers. We believe Tagboard possesses significant competitive advantages over legacy, hardware solutions and would-be newer entrants and can become the dominant vendor in the industry over the next few years.

We are thrilled to announce our participation in Tagboard’s Series A financing, alongside our new investment partners Grayhawk Capital, Next Frontier Capital, WISE Ventures, Sinclair Broadcast Group, SportsLoft and Spivey Private Capital. We’re delighted to welcome Nathan and the Tagboard team to the WestRiver family and look forward to working with them in the years to come.

#ONWARD