A founder usually has to explain why their app matters. Steven Motta would rather show you the number: creators on Waveful keep half of what they earn. Not a thank-you bonus. Half. That single design choice tells you most of what you need to know about the 22-year-old running the company - he is building the platform he wishes had existed when he was a kid uploading work to the internet and watching other people collect the money.
Waveful is an AI social app where people share their passions, gather into communities, and get paid for the content they make. Motta calls the mission something larger than a feature list. His public bio reads, simply, "on a mission to understand humanity." The product is the experiment. By 2025 it had crossed four million users worldwide and passed a million dollars in in-app purchases, all through a direct-to-consumer model with no advertising machine behind it.
The kid who coded for money
Most founders round up their origin stories. Motta's is almost suspiciously precise. He started making money as a developer at nine years old, building mods for Minecraft that collectively pulled more than two million downloads. By the time other kids were picking electives, he had a release history: a game called Speedy Car around 2016, then Cuddly Dragons, a mobile game he built at fourteen that found thirty thousand-plus downloads.
This is the detail that reframes everything that comes later. Waveful was not a college dorm idea or a career pivot. It was the next thing a person makes when they have already been shipping software to strangers for half their life. The teenager who designed the first version of Waveful at sixteen had a decade of production experience behind him.
I started making money as a developer when I was 9 years old, creating mods for Minecraft that got over 2M+ downloads.
— Steven MottaA hobby that got out of hand
In February 2020, Steven's older brother Dennis pitched him an idea: let's make something together. They were both developers, so they did. The first sketches borrowed from Instagram and YouTube - a creator-friendly place to upload photos and video. They built it in Flutter, ran it on Google Cloud, and shipped it to the App Store and Google Play on December 12, 2020, expecting it to reach a modest crowd.
It did not stay modest. As Dennis later told an Italian games outlet, the app "created such rapid word-of-mouth that it spread outside Italy, and we couldn't keep up as just two people." Five hundred monthly users in August became five thousand by October. The brothers went from a two-person hobby to hiring, structuring, and eventually relocating the center of gravity from Milan toward San Francisco.
The division of labor stuck: Steven on product and as CEO, Dennis as chairman and chief technology officer. A family company, run by family, raising venture money without giving up the thing that made it work.
The youngest in the room
In 2025 Waveful was accepted into a16z Speedrun, the games and consumer accelerator run by Andreessen Horowitz. Motta was the youngest founder in his batch, and Waveful was the only fully Italian startup in it - and, by the program's own account, the fastest-growing company in the cohort. For a company born in a Milan bedroom, sitting in a Silicon Valley accelerator as the standout was its own kind of vindication.
On September 2, 2025, the company announced a $2.1M seed round, structured as a clean all-equity deal. The cap table reads like a transatlantic handshake: a16z Speedrun, Italian Angels for Growth, Vento Ventures, Zest, and Vesper Holding, alongside a roster of individual angels from both sides of the ocean. The plan for the money was unglamorous and specific - grow the U.S. user base, build more AI-native features, and hire a handful of engineers and marketers.
Building software isn't the bottleneck anymore - noticing the problem is.
— Steven Motta, on building in 2026The numbers that earned the room
Accelerators do not hand out their "fastest-growing" label for charm. The figures behind Waveful's selection are the kind that make investors lean forward. The app reportedly ranked among the most downloaded social apps of 2025, sat in the top tenth percentile globally for engagement and retention, and crossed its early millions of users without a paid-growth budget propping up the chart. Reports out of Italy went further still, framing Waveful as the social app that out-downloaded TikTok on home turf.
What makes those numbers unusual is how they were earned. Most consumer apps buy their way to scale, spending venture dollars on installs and praying the retention holds. Waveful did the reverse - it grew on word of mouth first and raised money second, which is the order founders claim they want and almost never achieve. By the time the seed round closed, the traction was the pitch. The capital was confirmation, not rescue.
What he's actually betting on
Strip away the funding headlines and Waveful is a bet about loneliness. The pitch is that people are surrounded by feeds and starved of connection, and that the fix is not another place to perform for strangers but a place to find the handful of people who care about the same strange thing you do. Waveful organizes this into themed community spaces the team calls "Tsunami," sorted by passion rather than follower count.
The creator economics follow from the same logic. If the point is authentic connection, the people doing the connecting should be paid for it - hence the fifty-percent revenue share, generous by the standards of platforms that treat creators as inventory. It is a young person's idealism welded to a developer's discipline, which may be the most accurate description of Motta himself.
In 2026 he turned up in Lenny Rachitsky's "Tech Department of One" series, the kind of appearance that signals a founder has graduated from local press to the operator-canon. His argument there was characteristically blunt: in an era where AI can write the code, the rare skill is noticing which problem is worth solving at all. Coming from someone who has been noticing and shipping since primary school, it lands less like a hot take and more like a job description he has been writing his whole life.
He builds in three languages - Italian, English, and Dutch - signs his name with a dolphin, and open-sourced a design system called LuckyUI for AI-native apps along the way. The throughline is not the polish. It is the refusal to wait for permission. You can read the rest at waveful.com.