Ernesto Schmitt | |
---|---|
Born | August 1971 (age 52) |
Nationality | German, Uruguayan |
Citizenship | American, German |
Alma mater | Churchill College, Cambridge (MEng) INSEAD (MBA) |
Occupation(s) | Investor Entrepreneur |
Known for | The Craftory, Beamly DriveTribe, Fabula AI, Silverscreen, Peoplesound |
Children | 2 |
Relatives | see relatives |
Ernesto Gottfried Schmitt (born August 1971) is an American-born entrepreneur and investor. A founder of PeopleSound, Beamly and DriveTribe, he also founded venture capital fund The Craftory, with a $600m first fund for consumer goods challenger brands.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a German father and Uruguayan mother, Schmitt was raised in Brussels and Mexico. He attended Churchill College, Cambridge, where he received an MA in manufacturing engineering, later attaining an MBA from INSEAD. During the dot-com boom, Schmitt founded PeopleSound, the first platform for digital music streaming, which was backed pre-IPO by Bernard Arnault. Seen as one of the highest profile new-age internet startups, it was exited to Vitaminic in 2001 and listed.
Schmitt also founded Beamly, which pioneered social television, and was backed by HBO and Comcast before being acquired by S&P 500 component Coty, Inc., as well as social media platform DriveTribe alongside Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson. Other notable involvements include co-founding deep-learning company Fabula AI, acquired by Twitter in June 2019.
Schmitt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio where his father, Gottfried E. Schmitt, worked for Procter and Gamble. He grew up in Brussels and Mexico. [1] Schmitt's grandparents through his mother, Maria del Carmen Vieytes, are the Uruguayan actress Nelly Weissel and artist Juan Fernando Vieytes Pérez. [2]
After attending high school in Brussels, Schmitt was educated at the University of Cambridge, studying engineering, where he graduated top of class. After a year consulting for Boston Consulting Group, Schmitt received his MBA with distinction from INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France. [3]
In 1999, Schmitt founded PeopleSound. Going live in October 1999, it was the first European music streaming platform and the most visited. At peak, it was amongst the top ten most visited entertainment websites in Europe, with millions of registered users, and one of the highest profile new-age internet startups.
PeopleSound offered customers two free songs from every band as a taster and then invited customers to create their own compilations in CD Realaudio or MP3 format. It famously offered artists £100 for each submitted song. A darling of the dot-com boom, and receiving significant coverage, PeopleSound raised money based on a valuation of around £70m (in 1999), from Bernard Arnault's Europe@Web, investors including Finnish wireless communications operator Sonera Corporation and venture capital firm Zouk Ventures. Schmitt experienced significant media coverage at the time as an key example of the dot-com boom, including in the BBC documentary "Inside Dot Com". Being ranked in the top ten most popular entertainment sites and as one of the highest-profile tech startups in the UK; Les Echos named Schmitt "one of the elite figures of the London Net-economy", while ZDNet declared him "one of the UK's better known Web entrepreneurs". [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
In 2001, Vitaminic, the Italian-owned rival music website bought PeopleSound and merged services. The combined entity was listed on the stock exchange in Italy. [9] [10] [11] By August 2001, and following the internet bubble boom of mid-2000, Schmitt quit to take up a senior role for EMI in New York. [12] [13]
In 2003, Schmitt founded Silverscreen alongside Sebastian James. [9] Starting from an initial six stores in 2003, Silverscreen was the United Kingdom's first specialist DVD high street retailer offering an extensive selection of chart and non-chart products. The chain was credited with pioneering the implementation of editorial-led catalogue recommendation in mainstream retail, bringing alive deep archive titles in entertaining hotspots such as "before they were famous", "so bad, they're good", or "the greatest car chases on film".
Apax backed the original launch of Silverscreen in 2003 with £3.5m of funding and followed it up with a secondary fundraising of £20m in 2004 to help finance the company's ambitious plans to open 160 stores. The company received ~£33M total in funding and turnover in excess of £85 million. [9] [10]
In April 2011 Schmitt founded Beamly alongside Anthony Rose. [14] [15] Originally called tBone, then Zeebox, Beamly was marketed as a social discovery and engagement platform with 2nd-screen TV, creating the concept of social television. [16] [17]
Beamly, then called Zeebox, aimed to provide the optimal platform for connected television, making it a social and interactive viewing experience rather than the standard television viewing format. The platform allowed users to follow and interact with their favourite TV shows, as well as play games and take part in polls. It expanded to the US in September 2012 and into Australia in November. Beamly took on funding from BSkyb, Comcast, NBCUniversal, Viacom and HBO. Its first round valued it at above US$150M. It was sold to the New York Stock Exchange listed S&P 500 component Coty, Inc. in 2015 for an undisclosed sum. [18]
DriveTribe is an automotive online community platform founded by Schmitt, alongside The Grand Tour presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. The platform features different automotive-themed 'tribes' which people can join, post to, live chat with members of and share content on [19] The website launched in November 2016 with a few selected tribe members. [20] Financing for DriveTribe came from, among others 21st Century Fox and Breyer Capital, who have invested respectively $6.5 and $5.5 million in the platform. [21] [22]
Schmitt co-founded The Craftory with Elio Leoni Sceti as an alternative to traditional venture capital. [23] [24] it focuses on cause-driven investment in the consumer goods sector, investing in companies that positively impact the categories they serve. As of 2022, The Craftory has more than $600 million in permanent, early stage and growth capital (Series A, Series B etc.) to back 'challenger brands'. [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31]
Schmitt previously worked for EMI Music [9] [10] [14] as President of EMI Music's catalogue division and President of Global Marketing. In 2018, Schmitt Co-Founded Fabula AI, which aimed to solve the problem of online disinformation, or 'Fake News' by looking at how it spreads on social networks [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] Twitter announced its acquisition of Fabula AI for an undisclosed sum on 3 June 2019. [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42]
He has two children. [43]
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SoundHound AI, Inc. is a voice AI and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include a voice AI developer platform, SoundHound Chat AI, a voice-enabled digital assistant, and music recognition mobile app SoundHound. Key vertical industries include the automotive, IoT devices, restaurant and customer service industries. The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.
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Beamly was a social platform based in London, UK and New York City, United States. The company was founded in April 2011 as tBone TV, later renamed to Zeebox, by Ernesto Schmitt and Anthony Rose. It was started as a social discovery and engagement platform with 2nd-screen TV, creating the concept of social television.
CircleUp is a financial technology company based in San Francisco that focuses on consumer goods startups. Since its official launch in April 2012, CircleUp has helped several consumer companies raise equity, including Back to the Roots, Halo Top Creamery, Little Duck Organics, Rhythm Superfoods and others. General Mills has an investment fund that is partnered with CircleUp to invest in companies listed on the platform.
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DriveTribe was a social networking platform founded as a hub for automotive content and digital socialising. Founded by presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond alongside entrepreneur Ernesto Schmitt, the platform was characterised by its use of themed Tribes to build groups.
Anthony Rose is a serial tech entrepreneur whose career has spanned across many sectors including the advent of 3D graphics, P2P music, video streaming, social TV, social platforms, and most recently, legal technology.
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The Craftory is a British-American venture capital fund headquartered in Piccadilly, London, and also based in San Francisco. Launched in early 2018 by Ernesto Schmitt and Elio Leoni Sceti as an alternative to traditional venture capital, it focuses on cause-driven investment in the consumer goods sector, investing in companies that positively impact the categories they serve. As of 2022, The Craftory has more than $600 million in permanent, early stage and growth capital to back 'challenger brands'. The company is the first UK based B Corp fund, and in 2020 Forbes characterised the company as investing in companies 'disrupting the planet for good'.
Element AI was an artificial intelligence company headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. It was funded by the Government of Canada for CAD$5 million, and raised US$102 million independently, before being acquired by ServiceNow. Prior to its acquisition, it had collaborated with Amnesty International, Twitter, Singapore Management University, the Port of Montreal, LG Electronics, and others to release several studies.
Fabula AI was an artificial intelligence company founded in 2018. It focused on geometric deep learning, and used it to tackle the dissemination of 'fake news', tracking how content spread on social networks rather than focusing on the content itself. Founded by Michael Bronstein, Ernesto Schmitt, Federico Monti and Damon Mannion, Fabula was acquired by Twitter, Inc. in 2020, to help with their fight against misinformation.
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PeopleSound was a British audio streaming platform founded on 22 June 1999 by Ernesto Schmitt. Going live in October 1999, it was the first European music streaming platform and the most visited. At peak, it was amongst the top ten most visited entertainment websites in Europe, with millions of registered users, and one of the highest profile new-age internet startups.
Background: Half-German, half-Uruguayan, born in the US, grew up in Belgium and Mexico.
'PeopleSound.com Ltd. now leads Europe-based Internet sites for downloadable music. Based in Britain, it has German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian versions, and it emphasizes its local content.' 'In July, MP3.com and PeopleSound.com were the seventh and 10th most popular entertainment sites, respectively, among European Web surfers, according to MMXI Europe BV, a site-ranking firm.'
'one of the elite figures of the London Net-economy'
'one of the UK's better known Web entrepreneurs'
Peoplesound.com, one of the UK's highest profile remaining internet start-ups
Peoplesound.com is built on three principles: the principle that through clever technology, you can help consumers discover music, that an entire new generation of artists need to be distributed, but can't be distributed through the traditional channels, and that the music industry can benefit enormously from learning what works where and from interpreting the data that companies such as Peoplesound.com generate.
appointed Ernesto Schmitt as president of its catalogue business, reporting to Elio Leoni-Sceti, EMI Music's chief executive. He will join EMI next month. … DSG International, … group development director. From 2006 to 2008, he worked at Tesco as group ordering director, … Prior to that he was joint chief executive and founder of Silverscreen, … From 2001 to 2002 Schmitt was EMI Group's senior vice president of strategy and business development. Prior to that he founded peoplesound.com, … began his career at Boston Consulting Group … for four years.
His departure came as Vitaminic completed its £20.9m acquisition of Peoplesound, giving the company a combined catalogue of more than 329,000 tracks and agreements with over 1,200 record labels
First out the door and on to the first plane to New York was the chief executive of Peoplesound, Ernesto Schmitt, star of many a dot.com documentary. Schmitt has landed himself a plum role at EMI Group stateside, where he will fill a newly created position of senior vice-president of strategy and business development across the group's recorded music and music publishing divisions.
Mr Rose co-founded Zeebox in April with Schmitt. The company initially raised £5m in venture funding from undisclosed angel investors.
Ernesto's latest venture is 'The Craftory,' an investment vehicle aimed at backing the world's boldest challenger brands in the consumer goods space. The Craftory is self-consciously not a fund – rather, it is an 'investment company,' which Ernesto describes as 'anti-corporate' and 'anti-VC.' Whatever you may wish to call it, the Craftory has $300 million in its back pocket, and is set to make waves across the FMCG market..
Craftory was founded by technology entrepreneurs and investors Elio Leoni-Sceti and Ernesto Schmitt.
São Paulo – O grupo de private equity GP Investments anunciou nesta sexta-feira que sua subsidiária Spice Private Equity assinou um contrato para investir até 60 milhões de dólares na empresa de bens de consumo The Craftory.
Spice commits $60M to The Craftory.
Spice Private Equity has agreed to invest up to $300m in The Craftory, a newly-formed UK-based investment group focusing on consumer goods, alongside other investors.
The Craftory is a revolutionary concept: a new investment company dedicated entirely to backing disruptive new challengers in the consumer goods space.
Now, an investment group launching this week aims to nurture more of what it calls these " disruptive challengers toppling lumbering giants " by pumping $300m of private capital into the growth and development of upstart consumer goods companies.
He co-founded The Craftory, an investment group launched last month to help challenger companies grow.
Molti grandi consumer group negli ultimi anni hanno costituito propri fondi capitale come mezzi per individuare e investire in nuovi trend: tra questi vi sono le aziende alimentari Mars, Kellogg's, Danone, la distilleria Diageo e Unilever, la società di prodotti alimentari e per la cura della persona. Ma The Craftory – il cui logo è una lupa che cerca con lo sguardo e con occhi simili a laser i suoi «cuccioli investimenti» – si considera essa stessa un gruppo di concorrenti, tanto quanto le aziende nelle quali spera di investire. «Si pensi al numero incalcolabile di fondi di investimento, con personale e uffici prontamente rimpiazzabili. Ecco, noi cerchiamo di proposito di essere diversi», ha aggiunto Schmitt.