The Dutch startup iCasting builds momentum with their presence during The Next Web Conference. Their sophisticated online platform matches various talents to clients and cuts out the middle man. The Zwolle based startup is technically the biggest Dutch casting agency and now aims to further grow to 100.000 talents. They already hold a sounding international webdomain name. Â Â
Late founder Esmée Pater of iCasting shares her story with us.
Unique
“iCasting was born from an advertisement agency and is unique in the world”. Usually this founders quote is a red flag for investors because no startup is unique. However after a thorough due diligence in their just finalized seed round of €1M, no significantly comparable startup was found yet.
Data is still the new gold
The platform is free to use and various business models are currently being tested. “Main current goal is growth”. Data is the new gold and the exact business model will most likely involve  utilising this shiny metal. “We currently have 75.000 talents in our database. Because of the size of the talent pool, the platform is also used by a lot of current ‘old skool’ casting agencies. When we reach 100.000 talents, iCasting will seek new markets outside The Netherlands.”
Matching
The platform uses a considerate amount of variables and artificial intelligence for improvement by looking at prior assignments and variable combinations of search terms. Esmée whispered to us that “around 200 man years of development have been put into the platform”. My calculator says that’s around 350k hours. So basically more than 10 hours per person for anyone visiting TNW. That’s huge.
