Hubla.

A payments company wearing a creator-economy costume

Here is the thing about the creator economy, which for a while was the most over-narrated business story in the world: almost nobody in it gets paid. The founding thesis behind Hubla was that only about 1% of popular YouTube and Instagram creators actually monetize their audiences. The other 99% have followers, likes, a comment section - and no checkout button. Hubla decided that the interesting problem was not fame. It was the checkout button.

So it built one. Actually it built the whole apparatus around one: a customizable checkout that takes PIX, credit card and boleto; Netflix-style member areas to hold courses and mentorships; automated access to paid WhatsApp and Telegram groups; and, more recently, AI agents that chase down abandoned carts. If you are a fitness coach in Belo Horizonte or a stock-picking educator in Lisbon, Hubla is the machinery that turns "I have an audience" into "I have recurring revenue."

None of this was the original plan, which is usually how these things go. Hubla launched in 2020 under a decidedly less poetic name: ChatPay. The product was narrow and specific - a way to charge people for access to WhatsApp and Telegram groups and to kick out the ones who stopped paying. It is a small, unglamorous, deeply useful thing, and it got the company into Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch. Small unglamorous useful things frequently do.

That "business partner" line is worth pausing on, because it explains the whole strategy. Software vendors want to be indispensable; the strongest version of indispensable is when the customer stops describing you as a tool and starts describing you as a coworker. A creator whose entire storefront, membership, community and money movement run through you is not going to casually switch to a competitor over a fee difference. Which brings us to the fee.

The boring, beautiful business model

Hubla makes money the way payment companies make money: it takes a cut. The reported rate is roughly 8.9% + R$2.49 per sale, plus a small per-invoice charge on products that come with a managed group. That is it. There is no seat-based SaaS pricing, no enterprise sales motion, no annual contract. Every time a creator sells a R$970 course, Hubla earns. The company's revenue is, quite literally, a slice of the Brazilian creator economy's gross output.

This is a wonderful business when it works, because it compounds without a sales team. It is also brutally competitive, because Brazil has a crowded field of platforms - Hotmart, Kiwify, Eduzz, Cakto, Monetizze - all doing broadly similar things and all willing to shave a few basis points off the fee to win a creator. Hubla is not the cheapest option on the menu. Its bet is that owning the entire stack - checkout, courses, community, payments, analytics - beats winning on price. Bundling beats discounting when the customer's real pain is fragmentation, and for a solo creator juggling five tools, fragmentation is the pain.

From ChatPay to a R$60M Series A

In November 2021 ChatPay did two things at once: it rebranded to Hubla and it raised a Series A of around R$60 million (roughly $10-11M) led by Kaszek, Latin America's most decorated venture fund, with participation from FJ Labs, Big Bets and Kevin Efrusy, an early Facebook investor. The new name blends "Hub" (community) and "Blá" (chatter) - a small linguistic joke that encodes exactly where the company was born: group chats. At the raise, the company reported more than 1,000 active communities and about 60,000 monthly subscribers across Brazil and Portugal.

Then something quietly unusual happened. Instead of the familiar startup arc - raise, burn, raise again - Hubla says it grew revenue roughly 10x into 2025 and reached breakeven, to the point where it no longer depends on new funding to operate. It describes itself as open to strategic investors "but without urgency." In a market where most companies are perpetually one runway-extension away from a down round, not needing the money is the strongest position there is.

Who is actually on Hubla

It helps to be concrete about the customer, because "creators" is a word that has been stretched until it means almost nothing. On Hubla the paying creators cluster around a few durable categories: health, fitness and wellbeing; finance and investing education; gastronomy; music; and general education. Education, per the company's own read, is roughly 15% of sales and the most profitable slice - which tracks, because a course is a high-margin thing to sell and people will pay real money to learn a skill that changes their income.

The scale numbers are the kind you have to hold loosely, since they come from the company and from different points in time, but they sketch the shape of the thing. At its Series A, Hubla reported more than 1,000 active communities and about 60,000 monthly subscribers. Cumulatively it says 2.8 million-plus buyers have paid a creator through the platform. And at the top of the distribution sits a single creator generating more than $8 million a year - which is less a typical outcome than a proof point that the ceiling is high. The creator economy is a power law like everything else; Hubla's business is to serve the long tail well enough that the occasional whale finds it, too.

Under the hood, the money movement leans on partners. Hubla works with Yuno, a payment-orchestration provider, to route across local and global payment methods, and it has used Truora's AI chatbots to sharpen customer service. This is the unglamorous connective tissue of a payments company - the part nobody tweets about and everybody depends on.

What you can build on it

From the creator's chair, the practical value is that Hubla collapses a stack. Want to sell a R$970 cohort-based course with a private Telegram channel, monthly upsells and a member portal that looks like a streaming service? That is one platform, not five. Want to take PIX and boleto because your Brazilian audience does not all carry international credit cards? Built in. Want to run a subscription community and automatically revoke access when a card fails? That was the original ChatPay trick, and it still works. The pitch is not any single feature; it is that the tedious operational glue - access control, refunds, chargebacks, receipts - is somebody else's problem now.

Pointing AI at the part creators actually hate

The current chapter is, inevitably, about AI - but Hubla's version is refreshingly specific. In 2025 it launched Hubla AI Agents: WhatsApp sales agents that handle leads around the clock, recover abandoned carts (the company cites an average of about 17% recovery, and up to 35% for sellers who train the agent well), and provide tutoring support inside member areas. It tested these during Black Friday 2025. The roadmap points at churn prediction and pricing recommendations next.

What is notable is where the AI is aimed. Not at generating content, not at a chatbot demo for the pitch deck, but at the single thing most creators are worst at and most dislike: following up on a sale. That is the difference between AI as decoration and AI as plumbing, and Hubla, a plumbing company at heart, chose the plumbing. The stated goal for all of this is to push roughly R$2 billion in creator sales through the platform by the end of 2026.

A small team, an AI-forward culture

For all the volume flowing through it, Hubla is a lean operation - roughly 88 people, four founders, run out of São Paulo after early roots in Minas Gerais. CEO Arthur Alvarenga studied computer science in San Francisco before returning to Brazil, and Hubla is, by his own account, his third company; the founding team skews technical, with backgrounds across mobile, backend and product. The internal culture the company talks about is AI-forward in a literal sense: it uses AI to run leaner itself, not just to sell AI features to customers. For a fee-based business, every point of operational efficiency is a point of margin, and a small team that automates its own drudgery gets to keep more of the slice it takes.

The honest summary is that Hubla is a payments-and-tooling company that found an unusually large, unusually underserved customer base and decided to own the unsexy middle of their business. That is not a headline that trends. It is, however, a business.