• Jubilee is a media company best known for its YouTube videos about empathy.
• In September, it raised a $1.1 million seed-plus round and launched a new vertical, Nectar.
• See the pitch deck that persuaded investors to bet on Jubilee and its new venture.

In September, the media company Jubilee announced a $1.1 million seed-plus round, led by Strong Ventures and with the support of several angel investors.

Jason Y. Lee, a former banker, started Jubilee in 2017 with the goal of fostering empathy and "provoking understanding and human connection," he told Insider.

The company started with a YouTube channel and became popular for its video series like "Middle Ground," "Versus 1," and "Odd One Out."

Today, it has more than 40 employees, and its content appears across YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok.

Creating videos for social media is only part of what the company does.

Last year, Jubilee produced a documentary that was presented at the Tribeca Film Festival. This year, it launched a card game and a content vertical focused on love, Nectar.

With Nectar, Lee said he wanted to provide an empathetic take on dating, beyond the "broken swipe culture" young people experience today.

Funds for the seed-plus round are being used to toward this project.

With Nectar, Lee said he wanted to move beyond people viewing the videos to direct user participation in various forms.

The first steps in this direction have been building Loveprint — a love personality test that's a take on evaluations like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram — and organizing in-person dating events, recreating some of Jubilee's popular video formats, like "50 vs 50," where 50 women and 50 men try speed dating.

To seek funds, Lee went to investors who already knew Jubilee, like Steve Chen, a cofounder of YouTube, as well as prominent figures in the tech scene, like Sam Yam, a cofounder of the subscription platform Patreon.

"We were really strategic to actually look for angel investors who had tech experience," Lee said. "A lot of these folks have experience in building platform. We want to leverage their experience and their understanding so we can avoid a lot of pitfalls."

Lee set out to pitch investors in early spring, before the economy took a major hit.

As the economic situation worsened, he leveraged the fact that Jubilee was already profitable.

"A lot of investors are becoming a lot more conscientious and wary," Lee said. "I think it positioned us well that we had been pretty frugal in a lot of ways, pretty discerning, so people were a lot more interested in investing in a company that had a clear path to revenue existing but also future."

Read through 12 pages of the pitch deck Jubilee used to raise its $1.1 million seed-plus round:

Note: Four slides containing confidential information were removed at Jubilee's request. These slides were about the specific game plan to grow Nectar, details of products in development, and specifics of how the funding would be used.