Narrative Muse
Narrative Muse - Story, discovery and audience intelligence.
Publishers and studios greenlight what they can evidence. For most of the industry's history, that evidence has pointed toward the same audiences because the data infrastructure was built around them.
Narrative Muse maps reader and viewer taste across genre, identity, and emotional preference using first-party, opt-in data. For publishers and producers, that's acquisition intelligence. For readers, it's better discovery. The commercial case for inclusive storytelling has long existed, Narrative Muse provides the data to make it.
Fund: Te Pae ki te Rangi
Transaction Summary
Fund: Te Pae ki te Rangi
Date Invested: September 2021 (Seed)
Instrument: Equity Investment
IRIS+ Category: Diversity & Inclusion | Gender lens - SaaS
Why We Invested
Soul Capital invested at Seed in September 2021 through our Te Pae ki te Rangi fund. We backed first-time founders building a new data category inside an industry that didn't know how to build it for itself. The opportunity sits at the intersection of cultural equity and commercial intelligence, a combination that matters to us as investors and to the structural change we want to support.
Narrative Muse was named a 2025 Global Top 100 AI Innovation by UNESCO/IRCAI and selected for the 2026 Runway Builders Program for their unique approach to discovery and audience intelligence.
Measuring What Matters
Problem:
Diverse voices remain underrepresented in mainstream publishing and media. The tools for understanding audience demand were never built to surface them.
What:
Connecting stories with the audiences who want them. Giving publishers and producers the cultural intelligence to make better acquisition, marketing, and commissioning decisions.
Who:
Creators, decision-makers, and audiences historically outside the mainstream and the marketing teams working to reach them with greater precision.
How much:
Scale: Reader and viewer intent data mapped across genre, identity, and emotion
Depth: Adoption by publishers and screen producers to inform acquisition and campaign strategy
Duration: Long-term shifts in content strategy as first-party data makes the commercial case for inclusive storytelling
Contribution:
Narrative Muse provides a cultural intelligence layer that traditional audience data doesn't. Publishers and producers working without it are likely missing signals about where demand is heading.
Impact risk:
Execution. As a new category, adoption depends on integration into existing industry workflows.
Impact measures:
Titles surfaced from a wider range of creators. Publisher and studio adoption of Narrative Muse insights. Case studies showing measurable shifts in reader discovery, audience engagement, and market traction.
