Punch Up Live...Stand-Up Comedians Get Their Own Shopify

For those that know me, stand-up comedy is close to my heart, so it’s exciting that we finally get to announce our investment in PunchUp. Social Leverage led the $1 million pre-seed round with participation from Heracles Capital, Hustle Fund, Evil Twin Capital, and several angels. The round closed in November.

PunchUp has created a "Shopify for Comedians," providing them with a suite of high-quality tools. These tools empower comedians to communicate with their audience, expand their fan base, offer e-commerce solutions, and maintain ownership of their customer data.

The Company was co-founded by Danny Frenkel and Alex Dajani, two former Meta employees. Frenkel worked at Meta for 13 years, most recently as a director for its advertiser ecosystem; Dajani, PunchUp's CTO, spent four years as a software engineer for Meta, working on products across AI, Reality Labs, and Meta Ray-Bans.

Data is the most valuable asset in this world and what’s exciting about Punchup, is not only is the team super experienced, but they are really focused on helping comedians leverage data for their decision-making. Everything from touring locations, merchandise, where their audience is engaging and coming from, ticket sales, and more. Starting with comedians, but eventually, you can imagine all creators leveraging their powerful tools. 

Some of my favorite comedians are already using Punchup. I listen to a lot of comedy podcasts and so many are already talking about the company and getting ready to make it their home. Comedians already on the platform include Steve Byrne, Rachel Feinstein, Mark Norman and Sam Morril. 

In November, a big win for PunchUp was partnering with Morril to sell out his MSG Theater show in November. When they first started working with Sam his agency anticipated he would sell ~3k tickets and have to put up a curtain in the theater. He was one of the first comedians to fully adopt PunchUp as his website, which allowed the Company to hone in on which social platforms he was selling the most tickets from, what time of day, which days of the week he was selling tickets most and work backward from there to determine how to increase his sales. In the end, PunchUp was able to help him sell all 5k seats- something he gives Danny and Alex and the team credit for. 

With the new funding, PunchUp intends to stay lean and streamlined, using the capital to support its engineering, make technical hires, and build out its current monetization models.

Please tour around PunchUp and check out some of the comedian pages and have a few laughs.