The Seattle Startup Turning Amazon's Own Bonus Into a Creator Paycheck
Levanta connects Amazon sellers with vetted creators, tracks every sale through Amazon's own API, and lets brands pay commissions instead of bidding on ads. In roughly 20 months it went from a services idea to $286 million in annualized tracked sales - and a $20 million Series A.
Most Amazon sellers spend their days inside a single, expensive loop: buy the ad, win the click, hope the sale sticks, then buy the next click. Levanta was built on the suspicion that there is a cheaper, more durable way to move product - pay a creator when they actually sell something, and let Amazon quietly hand part of the bill back. That second half is the trick the whole company hangs on.
Levanta is a creator affiliate platform for e-commerce brands. In plain terms, it connects sellers on marketplaces like Amazon with a network of vetted creators, publishers, and influencers, then tracks the sales those partners drive so the brand can pay commissions on performance instead of guessing. It was founded in Seattle in 2023 by Ian Brodie, Rob Schab, and Spencer McKenney - a team that had already built and sold the agency version of this idea before writing a line of the software.
01 / The Bonus Hiding In Plain SightThe rule most sellers never claim
Amazon has a program called the Brand Referral Bonus. When a seller sends traffic to their Amazon listing from outside Amazon - a blog, a newsletter, a TikTok - and that traffic converts, Amazon pays the seller a bonus averaging around 10% of the sale. It is a reward for bringing new shoppers into Amazon's ecosystem rather than fighting over the ones already there.
The math that follows is the reason Levanta exists. A brand pays a creator a commission to drive an outside sale, then recovers a chunk of that spend through the referral bonus. Layer in the platform's tracking and the effective cost of a creator partnership drops well below the cost of an equivalent ad click. Levanta's job is to make every step of that loop visible, automatic, and repeatable.
Creator posts a link → shopper buys on Amazon → Levanta attributes the sale via Amazon's Attribution API → brand pays the creator a commission → Amazon pays the brand back a ~10% Brand Referral Bonus on the external traffic. Repeat.
02 / Why It ExistsAn agency turned into software
Before Levanta, the founders ran Grovia, an affiliate recruitment company that grew to seven figures and was acquired by Acceleration Partners in May 2022. Running the manual version taught them precisely where the repetitive work lived - finding creators, negotiating deals, chasing attribution, cutting payments. When they launched Levanta in March 2023, they were not guessing at the workflow. They were automating a job they had done by hand for years.
"I highly recommend anyone starting a business for the first time spin up a services business quickly - deliver value, then experiment with tech-enabled elements. That way you know exactly where the SaaS opportunity is."
- Ian Brodie, Co-Founder & CEOBrodie has described Levanta's early traction as an immediate product-market-fit moment: the platform reached roughly $230,000 in monthly recurring revenue within nine months and about $3 million in annual recurring revenue in its first year. His framing of the opportunity is unusually blunt - roughly 60,000 Amazon sellers fit the company's ideal profile, and Levanta has signed fewer than a thousand of them so far.
03 / The ProductWhat sellers and creators actually get
For a brand, Levanta looks like a control panel for an affiliate program: import products, set custom commission rates per item, recruit creators, and pay out automatically. For a creator, it is a marketplace of products to promote with clean, trackable links and reliable payments. In the middle sits the thing both sides actually need - attribution that says who drove which sale.
That attribution is the wedge against Amazon's own affiliate program. Amazon Associates pays low commissions and, crucially, does not tell a brand which specific creator or piece of content produced a sale. Levanta plugs into Amazon's Attribution API to make the funnel legible: clicks, conversions, and revenue mapped to individual partners. Commissions on the platform commonly run far higher than Associates' single-digit rates, which is what pulls serious creators in.
The platform also offers Paid Placements - flat-rate, guaranteed content deals for brands that want certainty rather than pure performance - and can blend the two into hybrid arrangements. Product sampling, messaging, and deal negotiation all happen inside the same marketplace, which is the piece Brodie tends to emphasize.
"We have this marketplace functionality that lets sellers and creators find each other, collaborate, message, negotiate agreements, and send product samples."
- Ian Brodie04 / The CustomersWho is actually paying for this
The brand list skews toward the kind of physical-product companies that live or die on Amazon: cookware maker HexClad, Caraway, hair-tools brand Kitsch, supplement brand MaryRuth, grooming company MANSCAPED, and recovery-tech brand Hyperice, among others. The results the company points to are specific rather than vague. Skincare-device brand REVO drove more than $1 million in sales through Levanta, with 96% of it coming from new-to-brand customers. Hyperice cleared $500,000 in a single quarter across three global marketplaces.
In the REVO case, 96% of Levanta-driven sales were new-to-brand customers. That is the metric Amazon sellers chase hardest - creators do not just convert, they bring shoppers who had never heard of you.
05 / The ModelSubscription, plus a cut of what works
Levanta makes money two ways at once: a recurring SaaS subscription and a performance fee on the sales it helps drive. A publicly cited example puts a plan near $750 a month plus roughly a 3.5% affiliate-revenue fee, with pricing that scales by team size, number of products managed, and feature tier. The structure aligns the company with its customers - Levanta earns more only when the brands earn more - and it is the same insight the founders learned running the agency: charge for the service, then productize the part that scales.
06 / The FieldWhere Levanta sits in the market
Levanta competes on two fronts. Against broad affiliate and influencer tools - Upfluence, Refersion, Impact, ShareASale, LTK - its pitch is marketplace-native attribution: it is built for the way Amazon actually tracks sales, not bolted on afterward. Against Amazon-specific rivals like Archer Affiliates and ProductWind, and against Amazon's own Associates and Creator Connections programs, its edge is the two-sided marketplace and the depth of its creator network. In April 2026 it made its first acquisition, buying the Amazon affiliate network Perch+ to add density to both sides of that marketplace.
The company has also stopped being an Amazon-only story. It now supports Walmart, Shopify, and TikTok Shop, and operates across the US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany, with Spain and Italy added. The positioning has quietly shifted from "affiliate tool for Amazon sellers" to "marketplace-agnostic creator platform for e-commerce brands."
07 / The MoneyA $20M bet on creator commerce
In November 2024, Levanta closed a $20 million Series A led by Volition Capital, bringing its total raised to roughly $21.4 million. The plan for the money was unglamorous and specific: scale the business-development team, deepen the product, and press its lead in creator-driven commerce for marketplace sellers. Volition's Larry Cheng framed the thesis simply - the affiliate and creator-commerce space is growing fast, and Levanta had the traction to ride it.
"This funding is a pivotal moment for Levanta. With the support of Volition Capital, we're primed to take our platform to the next level."
- Ian BrodieWhat a reader can take from all this is less a growth-hack than a discipline. Levanta found a real, boring financial mechanism - the Brand Referral Bonus - and built a business on making it easy to use at scale. It sold the service before it sold the software, so it knew exactly which manual job to automate. And it kept its incentives pointed the same way as its customers'. Whether creator commerce becomes as standard as paid search is still an open question. Levanta is betting that once a channel is this measurable, sellers stop treating it as an experiment.