Former Meta employees Danny Frenkel and Alex Dajani launched the entertainment platform Punchup Live to better understand the drivers behind their business. Since then, they’ve shifted focus to helping both artists and venues grow their audiences and revenue through ticket sales.
Frenkel and Dajani have likened Punchup’s creator-centric model to Substack’s. The platform has established itself as a leading destination for comedy, hosting over 5,000 hours of content. Recently, it debuted a 15-minute set by comedian Michelle Wolf reflecting on her experience hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Punchup also released veteran comedian Joe List’s “Small Ball” on June 5.
The platform is also rolling out the next installment of “Page to Stage,” an ongoing series created in collaboration with stand-up comedian Mark Normand that offers viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the craft of comedy.
Punchup Live recently raised $2.3 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by Social Leverage. In an exclusive interview with The American Bazaar, CEO Danny Frenkel and CTO Alex Dajani discussed their journey building Punchup, their vision for the platform, the fundraising process, and more.
The American Bazaar: How did you come up with the idea behind Punchup Live?
Danny Frenkel: We were at Meta for a long time and witnessed real progress in the e-commerce space. We saw a major shift as more people began making the majority of their purchases online, with Facebook playing a significant role in how they discover what to buy. One thing we realized is that live entertainment is an anomaly in the e-commerce world. Most sellers own the final destination where purchases happen, which allows them to run experiments and understand what’s actually driving sales.
In live entertainment, that’s not the case. Artists are the ones trying to sell tickets, but ticketing platforms are where purchases occur, and venues are where performances take place.
As a result, artists can’t run the same kinds of experiments to figure out what’s actually increasing ticket sales. So we started out as a company focused on helping artists better understand what’s driving their business. Now, we’ve expanded that mission to also help both artists and venues grow their overall business through ticket sales.
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What makes Punchup different from other entertainment platforms?
Danny Frenkel: I would say there are three categories of platforms. The first is subscription platforms like Netflix, where people pay a monthly fee to watch content. These platforms typically own a large portion of the content they distribute.
The second category is social media platforms. On these platforms, people share content for free in order to reach an audience. But what we’re seeing now is that the value exchange isn’t quite balanced. You can post a piece of content and get wide distribution, but you don’t get insight into who your actual audience is—or the ability to reliably reach them.
Then there’s a third category of platforms. We’re similar [to Substack] in that we’re a platform designed with the creator in mind.
Could you elaborate on how Punchup is similar to Substack? And how is it different from ticketing platforms like say, Ticketmaster or Stubhub?
Danny Frenkel: Ticketmaster sits at the very bottom of the [marketing] funnel. Once you already know what you want to buy, they allow you to purchase the ticket you’ve already identified as something you’re interested in.
Where we’re different is that we give people the ability to discover and understand what they actually want to go see. On our site, users can watch a wide range of content and explore local shows happening near them. Everything on the platform is designed to help people discover live events in their area. Even while watching content, users will see a pop-up showing where that performer is appearing locally.
We’ve brought the entire funnel—from discovery to conversion—into a single vertical. Normally, you’d have to go from Instagram to an artist’s website to Ticketmaster. We’re trying to consolidate all of that into one seamless experience.
Punchup started out as a platform focused on comedy, right? Are you continuing in that direction, or expanding into other areas of entertainment as well?
Alex Dajani: We definitely have plans to explore other areas. The hypothesis—building on what Danny mentioned about the funnel—is that this model works for all kinds of creators. We drew a comparison to Substack, right? Substack targets anyone who might write a blog, regardless of the vertical, with the thesis that you can monetize your content more effectively through the platform. They take only a small percentage of net subscriptions, while also providing network effects and increased user engagement.
Everything in that model—and in ours—is designed to help creators increase ticket sales. So you could easily imagine this being applicable to musicians or podcasters. We’re already starting to see creators who weren’t originally live performers—especially those who gained followings during the pandemic—begin to explore live shows.
To be clear, we’re laser-focused on comedy right now. We believe there’s still a lot of work to be done in that space. But we also think that everything we’re building could ultimately be applied to almost any kind of creator.
In June, you’ve raised $2.3 million in an oversubscribed seed fundraising round. Could you tell us more about it?
Danny Frenkel: We were very lucky. We initially closed a pre-seed round in October 2023, and our investors have been incredibly supportive. They essentially gave us additional funding to expand our ticketing products and, as Alex mentioned, to potentially move into other verticals and offerings.
We’ve maintained the same three major investors throughout the company’s lifetime, and we’re now raising another round that will bring in more industry strategic folks and new investors who have expressed interest.
You’ve mentioned an upcoming fundraising round earlier. Can you tell us more about it?
Danny Frenkel: It’s a new development. As Alex just hinted, we’ve come up with a really exciting AI strategy that we believe could be transformational. We’re now raising another round to make some serious investments in the AI space. So far, we’ve only had preliminary conversations, but we’ve been very encouraged by the level of inbound interest we’ve already received.
To be honest, it was really hard for us to raise money the first time. Around that time, The Information published an article titled “The Creator Economy Is Dead.” So I was out pitching to investors, saying, “This is going to be huge,” while a well-known publication was essentially saying the entire space was over.
Fast forward two years, and we’ve gained significant traction. And, somehow, the creator economy is not only alive—it’s clearly going to be one of the key areas of growth for the foreseeable future.
So it’s nice to be on the other side of that now. I don’t want to pretend it’s been easy—it was extremely hard early on. But now, we’re certainly grateful that things are a bit smoother, both in terms of fundraising and overall growth.
Alex Dajani: I’ll piggyback on that and just say—not to toot our own horn—but since we started the company, we’ve been very principled about the direction we believe is right for what we’re building. We’ve made a conscious effort to avoid jumping on hype cycles just because they’re trending. A lot of people chase investment by pivoting toward whatever’s hot—whether it’s AI, Web3, or the next big thing.
Even with our backgrounds—where you could argue we could have spun this into some kind of AI company early on—we chose not to. For us, it’s always been about what’s best for the product and what’s best for the artists on our platform.
And even though we had some early, demoralizing moments, we’ve stayed committed to our vision and strongly believed in what we were doing.
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That’s great. And congratulations in advance for the fundraising. Is the target audience for Punchup creators or people who enjoy live entertainment, or both? Are you focusing on one over the other?
Danny Frenkel: I think you just laid out the problem perfectly, right? There are creators, and the audiences who would like to see them, and the two don’t necessarily know each other, because the audience hasn’t discovered those creators. We basically want to solve that problem, so our target audience is both of them. We want to help audiences go see creators that they like, and that obviously helps the creators have a larger business, and it helps the audiences have a more fulfilled experience.
Punchup is an invite-only platform for performers. Can you elaborate on the decision to make it invite-only?
Danny Frenkel: Yeah, that’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Many platforms struggle with moderation. On every major platform, you see hate speech, misinformation, and just general noise that ends up polluting the experience for everyone.
The core issue is that there’s often no meaningful filter for who’s allowed to post content. One of the early decisions we made was to build a professional network that’s invite-only—specifically for people who have industry representation, like a manager or agent.
We’re essentially using those representatives as a filter to ensure that the people posting are serious comedians and that the content is actually intended to be stand-up or comedy-related. That’s why the platform is invite-only and structured as a professional media network.
Tell us about your acquisition of Tixologi and how it fits into Punchup’s broader strategy.
Danny Frenkel: That’s really the whole idea behind collapsing the funnel. We started by focusing on the discovery phase, and we’ve now reached close to a million monthly users. So we had the top of the funnel—people discovering new comedians.
Next, we needed to figure out how to address the bottom of the funnel. If someone wants to see a comedian live, they shouldn’t have to go through 12 different clicks to buy a ticket. We wanted to make that process seamless.
That’s why we acquired Tixologi and integrated a ticketing platform that can function both within Punchup and independently. This gives venues multiple entry points and helps capture as much of the audience as possible—ultimately making it easier for people to buy tickets.
Live entertainment took a major hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, right? Was Punchup influenced by that in any way?
Danny Frenkel: [Live entertainment] took a big hit during the pandemic, but it came roaring back afterward. I think that’s because people were craving personal, communal connection—and that really resonated with both of us.
Part of it was that we saw a real opportunity in the space, but just as importantly, we wanted to work on something we’re genuinely passionate about. Whether it was coming out of the pandemic or now, in a time dominated by conversations around AI, live entertainment remains something we deeply care about—and something that generally delivers a positive, meaningful experience.
Very few people go to a concert and come away feeling like it was detrimental to their quality of life. We both wanted to build something that brings people joy—and that passion has been what’s motivated us to work 100-hour weeks for the past two and a half years.
As former Meta employees, what key lessons or takeaways have you brought to building Punchup?
Danny Frenkel: There are two key things. First, moderation. Facebook has long struggled with moderation, and that was a major area of learning for us—how do we ensure we don’t face similar challenges?
Second, we’ve built a relatively large data science team for the size of our company, and like Facebook, we’ve invested heavily in understanding what actually drives business outcomes. I started at Facebook when I was 24, and I spent the overwhelming majority of my career there. So we’ve carried over a lot of lessons—especially around product development and ensuring that whatever tools we offer provide a measurable lift in business results for our clients.
What’s next for Punchup?
Alex Dajani: I’m trying to hone it down to just a few simple things—because honestly, it always feels like we’ve got twenty different things going on. We’ve already touched a bit on exploring other verticals, but from a technical and product development perspective, one of our biggest priorities is the mobile app.
READ: Former Meta executives receive $15 million in funding for AI assistant startup (March 28, 2025)
Our goal is to make it, for lack of a better phrase, the best in the world when it comes to consumer engagement—while also serving comics and other artists by helping them grow their business. Just like platforms such as Instagram or Substack leverage network effects to drive growth, we want to do the same. We haven’t been able to invest as much time into it as we’d like, so that’s a major focus on our roadmap.
Especially now that we’re doing ticketing, we’re starting to see more people who attend live shows engaging with the platform—and vice versa. If you’ve seen our website, we have a “shows nearby” feature, and we want to expand that. Ideally, we’d be able to say: “Hey, you follow this artist—here are events coming up near you.” Our acquisition of ticketing tech is a big enabler of that.
Now, in terms of AI—there’s obviously a lot of buzz around it. But we were very intentional about not jumping on the bandwagon just because it was trending. We’ve taken our time to make sure any investment in AI truly serves the artists on our platform.
And I’ll give a bit of a sneak preview: we’re developing a strategy to use AI-powered analysis for our ticketing partners and touring comics. The idea is to surface aggregated insights about their audience—like where they should tour, which cities are best for selling tickets, and how they can improve their business overall.
We’ve been deliberate about this because we see ourselves as a creator-first platform. While larger companies may use audience data to power their ad businesses, for us, the end goal—the bottom of the funnel—is always: how do we help you sell more tickets?
Figuring out how to align all of our tools and tech with that mission is challenging, but that’s the next big swing for us on the AI front.