Sylo (www.meetsylo.com)

HQ: New York, NY

The team: Brett Garfinkel, Erick Schwab (Co-Founders, Co-CEO's)

The problem: Celebrities are over — influencers are here to stay. And just like any other business, they  have marketing needs too, in an industry that’s ripe for the taking, forecasted to be $10B by next year.  Brands pay influencers to endorse their products through specific campaigns on their channels. But there’s fraud everywhere — and a growing market for it to get in the way.  

Meet Sylo: Sylo, one of the first third-party analytics and reporting company in this category, is ahead of the curve. They’ve emerged as the market leader for verifying, measuring and providing actionable insights on a campaign’s performance to both brands and the influencers that hawk them. Their platform vets influencers for fraud and assigns a numerical (SYLO) score to their content, similar to a Nielsen rating.   

Why we’re betting on it: What looks good on social media doesn’t always appear so in real life. That’s why legitimacy is key. And third-party verification is the first step for providing brands with better transparency and more effective marketing outcomes. Sylo already partners with some of the most vocal brands and agencies (e.g., Unilever, GroupM) and also start at the top with advertising associations (e.g., World Federation of Advertisers, The Advertising Protection Bureau) to co-publish and set the  guidelines for influencer marketing compliance. Consider what Nielsen did for TV, and comScore did for website traffic — Sylo is establishing itself as the gold standard for measurement. It could easily become the standardized metric and reporting platform in the still nascent influencer marketing industry.

Our take: Leading sources of third party verification and measurement have yielded strong multiples (i.e. Nielsen, comScore, Moat) and Sylo is ripe to be next.