He spent his twenties in the rooms that say no to creators - Blackstone, McKinsey, then a desk at Instagram watching people build real careers a bank would never recognize. So he built the bank.
A YouTuber pulls in seven figures a year and gets denied for a credit card. The income is real. The audience is real. The underwriting model is from 1989. Eric Wei runs the company built to close that gap.
Karat Financial, the Los Angeles startup he leads as co-CEO alongside his best friend Will Kim, issues the Karat Black Card - a charge card that sizes up applicants on their earnings and their audience metrics rather than their FICO score. Around it the company has stacked the unglamorous machinery of a real business: bookkeeping, tax help, business banking, the parts of being a creator that nobody films.
The premise is one sentence, and Wei keeps repeating it: professional creators are businesses. Treat them like it. "We help creators figure out the business side of what they're doing," he says, "so that they can focus on the creative." By mid-2023 the bet had pulled in more than $100 million in funding and a Visa partnership the company called a first for the creator economy.
What makes the story worth telling is the route. Wei didn't stumble into fintech from the outside; he arrived having sat inside the institutions that get to decide who counts - a restructuring desk, a consulting firm, a social platform's product org. He saw the gap from both sides of the glass. That dual vantage is why Karat reads less like a startup chasing a trend and more like a correction to a system that was quietly mispricing an entire generation of earners.
“Content is how community scales.
- Eric Wei, on why one good conversation, filmed, beats a thousand ad buys
The kid from Moorestown, New Jersey, did everything right - valedictorian, senior class president, then Harvard for economics with a secondary field in psychology. He has said he wanted to make things, to create. His parents nudged him toward something with a salary attached. So he did the responsible thing, four times in a row.
Blackstone, in restructuring, starting in 2013. McKinsey the next year. Facebook as a product manager in 2016, where he met Will Kim. Then Instagram in 2017, building for creators - including the Live product - close enough to watch a strange new economy take shape. People were making a living being themselves. And the financial system kept treating them like they didn't exist.
At Harvard he had already poked at this seam, helping pioneer income share agreements with JP Morgan and McKinsey people - bets on a person's future earnings rather than their past. Karat is the same idea wearing a Visa logo: stop reading the rear-view mirror, start reading the audience.
Before Karat had a brand of its own, Wei wore Instagram swag to creator conferences to borrow credibility and start conversations. Status, rented.
Days before Y Combinator Demo Day he killed a business-capital model with good metrics, and raised the round on a premise and a mockup - not a hockey-stick chart.
Wei refuses influencer sponsorships. He bets organic adoption by creators builds trust that money can't fake - and that paid hype before trust damages the brand.
"When they see all of their friends already use us," he says, the rest takes care of itself. Community first, video second, customers third.
Directional illustration of the 50-70% month-over-month organic growth Wei has described for Karat's first year of the card.
Traditional underwriting reads your past. It wants a W-2, a few years of steady salary, a payment history that looks like a metronome. A creator's income looks nothing like that. Money arrives in lumps - a brand deal here, an ad-share check there, a viral month followed by a quiet one. The lifetime value of a creator's business often lives in the audience, which is exactly the asset a bank's model can't see.
Karat's answer was to build a different lens. The Black Card analyzes a creator's cross-platform performance - the followers, the engagement, the earnings - and turns that into a credit limit. Where a legacy bank sees a freelancer with irregular deposits, Karat sees a media business with a measurable audience. The card came after Wei and Kim tested and abandoned other ideas - bookkeeping, business capital, even pandemic-era PPP assistance - until the card found product-market fit and pent-up demand did the rest.
From there the company widened. Bookkeeping and tax services, relaunched once Karat had earned credibility, grew in the double digits month over month and quickly ran past capacity. The throughline is the same: the boring, back-office work of running a business, handled, so the creator can keep making the thing the audience actually shows up for.
Income + audience metrics across platforms - not your FICO score.
The Karat Black Card, the flagship product, issued in partnership with Visa.
Bookkeeping, taxes, and business banking - the parts of creator life nobody films.
A creator is a business. Build the infrastructure that traditional banks never did.
When Twitter's cofounder, YouTube's cofounder and a clutch of the internet's biggest creators all wire money into the same fintech, the signal is loud: the people who built the platforms and the people who built audiences on them agree the banking layer was missing.
The July 2023 Series B was $70 million - $40 million in equity led by SignalFire, $30 million in debt from TriplePoint Capital - and it pushed Karat past $100 million raised. Wei framed the timing simply: close now to keep up with the growth.
Wei and Kim describe themselves as being let in on a secret. Kim, who spotted the gap first while working as an investor watching brand-influencer deals cross his desk, talks about creators building "a monopoly on that trust" with consumers. Wei takes it a step further: the line between a creator and a company is dissolving, and the businesses that win next will be the ones that learn to operate like creators - publishing, building audience, earning trust before they ask for a sale.
That belief shapes how Karat itself behaves. The company spreads its own story across YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, including its in-house Karat Podcast, treating content not as marketing exhaust but as the mechanism by which a community scales. The three-stage logic is almost embarrassingly plain: build awareness and trust, teach people something useful about credit and taxes, then - only then - ask for the business. Vulnerability is part of the formula. Wei is willing to be personal and real on camera, with clear boundaries about what stays private.
He also reads the macro picture as a tailwind. TikTok's discovery engine, new monetization models, and a wave of generative-AI tools have all made content easier to produce and easier to make money from. More creators, earning more, in more ways, means more people who need a bank that understands them. Wei is betting the creator economy isn't a moment to be timed but a structural shift to be banked.