Where Every Brand Meets Its Creator
The problem was hiding in plain sight. Every major media company, every enterprise brand, every global conglomerate had the same headache: they needed content - relentless, voluminous, culturally-attuned content - and they had no clean way to source it, track it, pay for it, or control the budget around it. A spreadsheet here. A wire transfer there. A Slack thread that nobody could find six weeks later.
Ryan Hollander stepped into the CEO chair at Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter) to fix exactly that. The company had already spent twelve years proving the model - building the industry-standard marketplace for global video production under founding CEO Jaron Gilinsky - and when Gilinsky stepped back in August 2024 after more than a decade, Hollander took the wheel of a platform that already had 50,000 vetted creators across 192 countries and $125 million in payments processed.
The company Hollander now runs began in Brooklyn in 2012. Gilinsky and co-founder Alex Ragir built Storyhunter as a network of video journalists - the kind of platform that let CNN or National Geographic tap a local filmmaker in Lagos or Jakarta instead of flying a crew from New York. It worked. They produced 10,000 videos a year for some of the most recognizable media brands on the planet.
Then the rebrand. Storyhunter became Glimmer - not just a new name but a new surface area. Instead of video only, the platform now covers 60+ creative services: photography, 3D animation, drone videography, copywriting, motion design, live events. Morgan Stanley, the New York Stock Exchange, Warner Bros. Discovery, Starbucks, and Bloomberg all use it. When Glimmer counts CNN and Meta among its anchor clients and has generated over 100 billion views through Meta partnerships alone, the word "marketplace" feels too small.
"This platform provides financial visibility and controls that CFOs and Exec Producers have desperately sought."
- Alan Schulman, Former Chief Creative Officer, Deloitte Digital & Glimmer Advisory BoardWhat Hollander inherited - and is now scaling - is the infrastructure layer of the creator economy for enterprise. Not consumer-facing. Not a social platform. A workforce management solution with an enterprise-grade financial control system: real-time spend dashboards, automated budget enforcement, consolidated invoicing, tax reporting across 180+ countries, and integrations with Oracle and NetSuite. Glimmer handles the part of content production that nobody talks about until it breaks.
The company is backed by $11.9 million in total funding, with investors including NFX and Draper Associates. Its October 2021 seed round brought in $4.8 million. Glimmer's 57-person team operates between its 1412 Broadway New York headquarters and a distributed global footprint that mirrors the reach of its creator network.
Three Offerings, One Backbone
Glimmer isn't a single product. It's a stack. The platform's three layers address different layers of the content production problem - and together they make the case for why no single competitor can match it.
The AI matching layer is what makes the marketplace scale. Not every freelancer platform can onboard 5,000 production companies for a single client (Meta) and manage the payments, contracts, and project tracking that goes with it. Glimmer's AI-powered matching algorithm connects brands to the right creator for the right job - in any of 192 countries - without the 14 emails and two weeks it used to take.
Tax reporting across 180+ countries. Accelerated payouts. Creator vetting across skill, location, and prior work. These are the un-glamorous details that make enterprises trust a platform with budget authority. Glimmer has spent twelve years building exactly that stack - and Ryan Hollander now has the wheel.
Twelve Years in the Making
The story of Glimmer is really the story of a bet on distributed creativity - that the best filmmaker for a CNN piece on Jakarta was probably already in Jakarta, not on a flight from JFK. In 2012, that was a contrarian idea. By 2025, it's the operating assumption behind every content budget at a major media company.
The Roster Says Everything
When a platform's client list includes the New York Stock Exchange, Morgan Stanley, Warner Bros. Discovery, Starbucks, Airbnb, Hearst, CNN, Bloomberg, and Meta - that platform is no longer a startup story. It's infrastructure.
Glimmer has generated over 100 billion views through its Meta partnerships alone. That number is not a vanity metric - it's evidence that the matching, vetting, contracting, and payment workflow actually functions at scale. Meta doesn't trust 100 billion views worth of creator content to a platform that can't perform.
The advisory board Glimmer assembled reflects where the company is aiming. Sandy Climan produced The Aviator and ran CAA. Alan Schulman was Chief Creative Officer at Deloitte Digital. Robin Wood Sailer is a former Bloomberg and Dow Jones executive. Dan Longhi is the founder of Sundial Ventures. These are not decorative names.
Glimmer Select, the managed production arm, is led by a former VaynerMedia studio head and a former CNN Digital executive. The platform isn't just a directory - it runs end-to-end productions for enterprises that don't want to think about the hiring, contracting, and billing themselves.
$210 Billion Worth of Chaos
Corporate content spending sits at $210 billion globally. Most of that money moves through processes that haven't changed much in a decade - emails, spreadsheets, wire transfers to individual creators in twenty currencies, and finance teams trying to reconcile it all at quarter end.
Glimmer's argument - and Ryan Hollander's bet - is that the enterprise world will pay for the infrastructure to make this legible. Real-time spend dashboards. Automated budget enforcement. Tax compliance across 180+ countries. Consolidated invoicing. These aren't features that win TechCrunch demos; they're the features that win RFPs from CFOs.
"Bringing financial control and operational efficiency to the exploding $210 billion in spend on content production by global corporations."
- Glimmer Technologies, 2025 Launch StatementGlimmer's 2025 roadmap includes expanding AI capabilities - helping enterprises leverage both human creators and AI-augmented production tools to meet the demands of an increasingly content-driven economy. The creator economy is going enterprise. Ryan Hollander is building the platform that gets it there.