Subsets raises $1.65M to automate retention for subscription media using explainable AI

Today, we are proud to share that Subsets has raised $1.65 million in pre-seed funding, led by Upfin and Y Combinator, with support from a group of institutional and angel investors including Cuesta Labs, Sandhill Markets, and Peakon founder Phillip Chambers.

This funding allows us to do what we set out to do: help subscription businesses retain more customers without relying on guesswork or black-box machine learning.

The retention problem is bigger than most people realize. 

Subscription media companies lose up to 40% of their subscribers every year. At the same time, the cost of acquiring new customers has more than doubled over the past decade.

For subscription businesses, retention is no longer a tactical concern. It is a survival issue. And yet, most commercial teams are still left with static dashboards, unclear signals, and generic CRM sequences. 

We started Subsets to fix that.

Built for commercial teams. Powered by explainable AI.

Subsets helps companies like The Athletic and Børsen identify churn-risk audiences and run automated retention experiments without needing a data science team.

You connect your subscriber data from your CRM, CMS, billing system, or warehouse, and our platform surfaces dynamic audiences based on churn-driving behavior. Then we suggest experiments to test across these groups: a push notification series, an email discount, and a feature unlock.

Whatever works gets automated. What does not work becomes part of what we learn from.

The engine behind this is a proprietary AI framework based on gradient boosting and temporal sequencing, inspired by xAI and built to make churn understandable. It is not just for engineers but for everyone. We believe commercial teams should not just see that someone is at risk of churning. They should know why and what to do about it.

That is what makes our AI both explainable and genuinely useful to the teams who rely on it.

What this round means for us

We launched Subsets six months ago out of Copenhagen. Since then, we have onboarded several leading subscription publishers, run thousands of experiments, and built a product that teams can use without friction or fine-tuning.

This pre-seed round gives us room to grow, expand our product, hire across engineering and growth, and focus even more deeply on subscription media, telco, and streaming.

A thank you

Thank you to our team for building fast and thinking deeply, to our investors for believing in this vision early, and to our early customers for helping us shape what Subsets is today and what it will become.

The subscription economy is only getting bigger. Our mission is to make sure it is also more predictable and that retention becomes a growth lever, not a leaky bucket.

If you are building or scaling a subscription business and want to understand, predict, and improve retention without the guesswork, we would love to talk.

Subsets Co-founders,

Martin, Oliver, and Nikolai

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