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Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, an online crowdfunding and subscription streaming platform for content creators and audiences that emphasizes diversity and inclusion. Best founded the company in 2012 and is responsible for business development, fundraising and overseeing all day-to-day operations.
In addition to her work at Seed&Spark, Best produces film, series and VR that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW and other festivals. Best produced projects including "Like the Water," a feature film starring Caitlin FitzGerald ("Masters of Sex," "UnREAL"); "Fck Yes!," a digital series about sexual consent which she also cowrote and codirected; Janicza Bravo's virtual reality film "Hard World for Small Things" which premiered at Sundance; and James Kaelan's "The Visitor," which premiered at Slamdance and was featured at Tribeca.
Best was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Business Journal "Woman of Influence," a 2015 Upstart 100 entrepreneur (Business Journals), received the Ivy Film Innovator Award in 2015 and in 2016, graduated from Techstars Boston, an elite accelerator program for the country's top entrepreneurs. Best has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding and rewards-based crowdfunding and has personally participated in more than 300 crowdfunding campaigns.
An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about building equity and sustainability for everyone. She also runs workshops to help independent content creators successfully crowdfund, build an audience and pitch their projects.
Seed&Spark is an online platform that offers crowdfunding for independent movie and television creators, a streaming subscription service for audiences and educational events for creative talent. Crowdfunding projects and streaming content on Seed&Spark emphasize diversity and inclusion with more than 70 percent coming from women, people of color and LGBTQ talent. The streaming subscription service, available on Apple TV, Roku or online using any device, offers a highly curated library of award-winning movies and television shows with subscribers having the option to pay what they can every month. Since the company was founded in 2012, more than $16 million has been raised for over 1,100 movies and television shows, boasting a campaign success rate averaging 80 percent which is the highest of any crowdfunding platform in the world. Seed&Spark also holds more than 125 educational events every year across the country to help content creators get their projects produced and distributed.
