Kesha seeks seed funding for her 'LinkedIn-like' startup

Kesha has branched out from being a chart-topping pop star into a businesswoman. The singer behind the 2010 hit Tik Tok is looking to raise seed funding for her social media startup, Smash.

In an Instagram post earlier this week, Kesha unveiled Smash as a "new community-based platform to connect and protect music creators."



The motto aligns with her eponymous music label, Kesha Records, which she launched in September last year.

Kesha's Smash app and her record label find their origins in a darker past involving a bitter legal battle with her producer, Lukasz "Dr Luke" Gottwald, over a predatory record deal she signed as a teenager.

The LinkedIn-style app is meant to help creators connect, with the option to offer their services, similar to freelancing platform Fiverr, Kesha said in an interview with Wired. The app will prioritise artists' right where they are not forced to part with rights to their creations.

"I want a place where artists and music makers of any kind can have community, they can collaborate, they can hire each other and retain all the rights to everything they create," Kesha said. "There’s no gatekeeping of contacts."

Kesha has onboarded Alan Cannistraro as the chief technical officer (CTO) for Smash. He was behind some of the first iOS apps during his 12 years at Apple, before leaving to work at Facebook, where he built the Year-In-Review feature. He then went on to start a social video platform called Rheo.