tiun, a fintech helping media providers to attract, engage and convert younger audiences, is today announcing a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Founderful. The funds will kick-start their efforts to become Europe's preferred way to pay for online media.
In particular, the tiun team is focused on onboarding new business partnerships and integrations with third-party payment methods i.e. digital wallets. These will simultaneously provide media platforms with exposure to previously untapped audiences while also allowing a new generation of users to access and pay for media by “tiuning in”, offering more convenience and flexibility while being more secure.
The tiun team believes that consuming and paying for online content should be simple and that users shouldn’t need to create a new account, give up personal information, provide credit card details and subscribe - every time they find a new media platform. Especially among young users, the tedious process of registering and subscribing is not considered “convenient” anymore. tiun offers media companies easy-to-integrate solutions that allow a new means of authentication and payment to provide world-class user experiences that drive millions of users, and increase customer spending and engagement.
Swiss VC firm Founderful led the round, which also included Blue Wire Capital and a16z scout Maximilian Lehmann, among other angel investors.
tiun was founded in early 2023 by the experienced co-founder trio Nikolaos Christoforakos, Christian Heiduschke and Sandro Zweig. Ex-BlackRock Zweig previously led a fintech product development agency that boasted Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank amongst its clientele. Christoforakos provides tiun with expertise in go-to-market strategies having previously helped scale teams at the likes of Amazon and Moss. Lastly, Heiduschke has almost a decade of experience in building scalable, robust SaaS products, having originally achieved a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich.
Born out of a shared frustration at being hit with paywalls the team quickly agreed there must be an alternative, more user-friendly way of charging for media, which doesn’t require the repetitive surrendering of personal data, and began work on a solution.
tiun Co-founder Nikolaos Christoforakos explains, “There’s a clear disconnect between the modern way we expect to consume media and how media is bought and paid for today. The subscription model was invented to bring convenience to consumers, preventing them from having to pay for every item they wanted to consume. This worked too for the media providers, who got consumer loyalty in return - so the model grew exponentially. That same experience can in today’s world often be a hindrance for a young user to convert and become a loyal customer. tiun intends to build that bridge by working closely with media businesses, in a way which will significantly benefit both consumers and media businesses.”
tiun enters the market at a time the news media industry is in financial freefall. A lack of revenue is causing significant layoffs throughout the industry. Estimates by the Press Gazette suggest that 2,500 media jobs have been cut in the US and UK this year alone.
Big-name takeovers in the US haven’t yet solved the problem, either. Over the past decade, Jeff Bezos, Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Marc Benioff bought The Washington Post, LA Times, and Time Magazine, respectively. Despite their backing, those three publications alone lost an estimated $150 million in 2023.
tiun builds the infrastructure that allows younger audiences to connect their wallet with an online service in a few clicks to access and pay for media, allowing them to pay for the time they consume.
Pascal Mathis, Partner at Founderful, says, "The internet has become the dominant way by which people consume media. Be it television, printed media, the radio, or physical CDs, one by one the internet has triumphed by facilitating a smoother, simplified user experience. The one area online media has failed to address, however, is effective monetization, deterring users with inconvenient and fragmented methods. Tiun removes these hurdles, creating seamless connections between consumers and providers. We're thrilled to support the team in solving this challenge at such an early stage."
The tiun team sees vast potential in the solution in all kinds of media beyond written news, including streaming, and gaming. The company has already onboarded 50+ media titles across Central Europe, which are making use of the infrastructure.
The tiun infrastructure can track activity and end the session if there is no movement after a given time, preventing users from overspending. To incentivize uptake, tiun limits the amount media providers can charge users to a maximum of 20% of what a monthly subscription would cost. Once those limits are reached, the remainder of the month is free. The data and insights gathered by the platform can be used to inform media strategies to ensure media is as engaging as possible.
Bertie Highmore, Head of Investments at Blue Wire Capital says, “The tiun team have extensive experience in - and demonstrated ability for - building, launching and scaling digital platforms. Strong appetite has already been shown for their product, which solves one of the biggest emerging issues in online media. We’re excited to be on board, and are looking forward to what will be a huge next twelve months for them.”
The tiun team is delighted to raise its initial funding round to develop a first-of-its-kind solution to modernize the way online media providers charge for their services. The team will share a series of exciting updates in the coming year.