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CHART OF THE WEEK
By Sam Fiske | Read
With American Family Day arriving Sunday, August 2, Kingscrowd looked at where family ties may show up in the crowdfunding market. Our latest screen found 792 companies where at least two founders share a last name, representing 1,078 recorded campaigns. Food, beverage, and restaurant companies dominate the list with 246 companies, or 31.1% of the total, followed by alcohol-related businesses, media, consumer products, and healthcare. While a shared surname does not prove a family relationship, the data offers a revealing look at the consumer-facing sectors where family-like founder teams appear most often.
TOMORROW: KINGSCROWD DEMO DAY Q3 2026
Demo Day Q3 2026 is Tomorrow
Join us tomorrow, July 29 at 3pm ET, for Kingscrowd Demo Day Q3 2026—featuring live pitches from Oshi, TibaRay, Airthium, and Global Fight League. Hear directly from founders building across plant-based seafood, cancer treatment, industrial decarbonization, and sports entertainment, then ask your questions live and get investor-focused insights from Chris Lustrino and the Kingscrowd investment team.
KINGSCROWD PODCAST
Are alternative asset platforms becoming funds?
This week on the Kingscrowd Podcast, Brian Belley and Scott Kitun break down Rally’s shift away from direct fractional ownership of collectibles and what it could signal for the future of crowdfunding platforms, tokenized funds, and alternative assets. Then Brian is joined by Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau for a deal review of Oshi, a plant-based salmon company with real traction, a reset valuation, and meaningful scaling risks.
PITCH REVIEW 💸
By Léa Bouhelier-Gautreau \ Deal Report
Brief: Influence Mobile,
Léa’s Quick Take:
I just talked with Influence Mobile CEO Daniel Todd. At the end of the call, I understood that Influence Mobile’s business is a math game.
Back in 2023, Influence Mobile reached $62 million in revenue and $10 million in EBITDA. At the time, it was spending almost $100,000 every day acquiring new users. Why? Because every additional dollar spent on advertising generated more than a dollar back. When the math works, you spend more. When it doesn't, you stop.
The business itself is simple. Mobile game companies pay Influence Mobile to bring them new players. Influence Mobile rewards those players with gift cards for downloading and playing games. For example, if the publisher pays $40 for a user and Influence Mobile spends $20 acquiring and rewarding that user, everyone wins. The publisher gets a valuable customer. The player gets free gift cards. Influence Mobile keeps the difference. Then it repeats the process millions of times.
But then Influence Mobile became a victim of fraud. Some fraudsters found ways to collect rewards without becoming valuable players. Mobile game companies started seeing lower-quality users, so they Influence paid less than expected, or rejected installs altogether. The economics no longer worked. Influence Mobile cut its advertising spend from almost $100,000 per day to less than $30,000 and focused on improving fraud detection instead. Today, it expects to finish 2026 with about $22 million in revenue.
Now the numbers have to work again, and Influence Mobile is working to rebuild the business. There’s an additional opportunity: while Influence Mobile was only working on Android, they will now start operating on iOS. Apple just allowed Influence Mobile and its competitors to reward iOS players, which is opening a brand new market.
This deal is about backing a company that has the playbook to grow but still needs to execute it seamlessly. And to make up my mind about whether they can rise again, here are the three main questions I'll be focusing on during diligence:
Can Influence Mobile once again spend $100,000 per day acquiring users and become profitable again?
How much growth can realistically come from iOS and the new white-label strategy?
If the company executes, what is the most likely exit, and will that generate an attractive return from today's $50 million valuation?
Want deeper analysis on every deal?
The Pitch Review you just read is a taste of what Kingscrowd Edge has to offer. Edge members get 5-star quantitative ratings, expert-reviewed analyst reports, and portfolio tracking across every active raise, plus access to Top Deals, our highest-conviction picks from the Kingscrowd analyst team. Only a select few raises earn that designation. If you're not already an Edge member, try it free for 7 days.
STAFF PICKS 🌶️
By Teddy Lyons
ORBITBeyond, once selected by NASA for a commercial lunar delivery contract and now building landers to carry payloads to the Moon, filled its entire $5M offering within a couple days of filing, which says as much about appetite for space stories right now as it does about the business.
By Teddy Lyons
XrossWorld AI is building the pricing and payments infrastructure for the creator economy, essentially trying to become the Nielsen of influencer media. While a $5M agency deal and $10M in letters of intent look promising, most of that revenue has yet to be booked or executed on.
That's a wrap on this week's issue!
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