Mike Hurst

Mike Hurst is the CEO/Co-founder of Exactuals, a provider of innovative solutions for complex payments and metadata issues in the entertainment industry. Under Hurst’s leadership, Exactuals first established itself as a SaaS leader in the film/TV payments space, raising more than $23 million in funding to date and solidifying a long-term contracts with the industry’s largest talent union, the Screen Actors Guild, and the industry’s largest payroll provider, Entertainment Partners, amongst others. Exactuals recently expanded into music, executing secure payments in over 100 countries for record labels and publishers through its flagship product, PaymentHub. In May of this year, Exactuals introduced RAI, an artificial intelligence tool used by music companies to ensure their works are properly registered with Apple, Spotify, and other DSPs. RAI uses machine learning to optimize and enhance music metadata to ensure works are registered properly for royalty attribution. Labels, publishers, PROs, and DSPs all use RAI to get on the same page. Hurst led Exactuals toward its acquisition by City National Bank, Americas premier private and business bank, in August 2018. Exactuals will continue to modernize the residuals and royalty payment process for the entertainment industry, and over time, it plans to expand to serve other businesses as a wholly owned subsidiary of City National Bank. Prior to founding Exactuals in 2011, Hurst — recently included in Billboard’s “40 Under 40” list — spent more than four years at Oracle helping traditional software companies launch SaaS offerings. During his time as a senior manager at Oracle, Mike was exposed to the inefficiencies surrounding residuals distribution in the media and entertainment industry, and he began to develop the relationships and insights that would form the basis for Exactuals. Hurst incubated the Exactuals business model over the course of his time at Stanford Graduate School of Business, with guidance from some of Silicon Valley’s most trusted advisors. As a Stanford StartX Mentor since 2012, Hurst finds fulfillment working with StartX portfolio companies as they raise early stage financing and build their go-to-market strategies. Hurst lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Anna, and their identical twin boys.