AI agents for creative professionals.
The next decade of professional software will be defined not by dashboards but by agents — software that does the work, not the display. Riptide builds those agents for creative professionals whose craft has been underserved by generic AI.
Why now
Multimodal models (Gemini 2.5, GPT-5, Claude 4.7) crossed the threshold where they can read a scene, watch a performance, or plan a workflow — not just answer a chat.
The tools serving actors, streamers, and creators haven't caught up. Casting Networks, Actors Access, and StreamElements are still databases and forms — spreadsheet UIs behind subscription paywalls. The wedge is agents that do the work between the tools.
The opportunity
Actors alone: 160,000+ working in the U.S., 1.2M+ globally.
Adjacent creative professionals: streamers, voice actors, comedians, models — 8M+ paying for craft tools they hate. Riptide's thesis: one shared agent-primitives layer can serve them all, starting with the audience the founder knows best.
The portfolio
Six products across three surfaces (iOS app, iOS app inside another workflow, scheduled agent). One shared analysis engine. See the public portfolio →
Traction
CastPilot is live on TestFlight and has ~30 committed beta users drawn from R.J.'s active acting-industry network in Atlanta and Los Angeles. The flagship is pre-launch; the studio behind it is not.
Five additional products — TapeReader, StreamPilot, Sunday, Obsidian Intelligence, and The Brief — are shipping or in build, each validating a different agent primitive (video analysis, live event capture, scheduled content, health-data agents) that the entire portfolio inherits from.
Every product to date has been built solo, from a phone. That's proof of operator throughput. It is also the constraint the raise removes.
The ask
Pre-seed SAFE. Deployed to (1) hire two engineers to move Riptide off phone-only and into a proper build cadence, (2) run growth for CastPilot in the acting-industry channels R.J. already operates in, and (3) build the shared agent-primitives layer that the entire portfolio inherits from — the long-term moat.