creator-monetization
(14)
Exly
Exly is an all-in-one business platform for coaches, trainers, consultants and creators to launch, sell and manage knowledge products - courses, webinars, workshops, e-communities and 1:1 consultations. Spun out of the YC W19-backed startup MyScoot, the Delhi-based company gives solo experts a no-code website, built-in CRM, payment collection and marketing tools so they can run the business side of their practice without stitching together five different apps.
Stipop
Stipop is a sticker infrastructure company that lets any app add a searchable library of 150,000+ stickers with a single line of code, through its API and SDK. Founded in Seoul by roommates-turned-cofounders Tony Park and Daniel Cho, it grew a marketplace of thousands of global artists, powered sticker features for Google, Microsoft Teams, Canva and Adobe, and joined Snap's Yellow accelerator and Y Combinator (S21). It has since expanded toward monetization tools for character-IP creators and AI chat products.
Top Road
Top Road is a Sydney-based, Y Combinator-backed startup that gives creators no-code payment and analytics tools to turn custom GPTs into revenue-generating apps inside the OpenAI GPT Store. Its GPT Tools action lets builders add subscription paywalls, collect emails, whitelist users, and track usage - without writing code. The company says it has enabled more than USD 300K in subscription revenue for GPT builders.
Nexus
Nexus is an Austin-based software company that helps video game publishers build and run native Support-a-Creator programs. Its platform gives live service games a 'creator program in a box' - API-driven creator codes, sales attribution, creator storefronts, and managed global payouts and taxes - so studios can reward the streamers and content creators who drive in-game purchases, engagement, and retention. Customers include Capcom, Hi-Rez Studios, and Another Axiom, and the company raised a $10M Series A in January 2023 led by Griffin Gaming Partners.
Justin Sacks
Justin Sacks is the co-founder and CEO of Nexus, an Austin-based platform that helps live service video games build and run 'Support-a-Creator' programs at scale. After 15 years in gaming as a competitive player, content creator, and business development lead, he now builds the infrastructure that pays creators for driving discovery, engagement, and in-game sales for titles like Sonic Rumble, Bloons TD, and Town of Salem.
Justin Smith
Justin Smith is the CEO of SamCart, an Austin, Texas based e-commerce and checkout platform that has helped more than 75,000 creators and entrepreneurs sell over $3.5 billion in products and services online. He rose through the company from Head of Product to Chief Operating Officer before stepping into the CEO role, and he has become a frequent voice on the future of the creator economy, the shift from awareness to conversion in online selling, and how AI is reshaping how small businesses sell. Before SamCart he worked in marketing and business development at high-growth SaaS companies including Curalate and LivePerson.
Captain.tv
Captain.tv (formerly Stream Captain) is a San Francisco game studio building a new category it calls streamer-led games - free-to-play titles designed for a live streamer to host and play alongside thousands of their viewers on Twitch and YouTube. Its flagship, Stream Raiders, lets a broadcaster act as captain while the audience drops units onto a shared battlefield. Viewers buy and gift cosmetic items, and a revenue-sharing model pays creators directly. Backed by a $10M Series A, Captain.tv grew to more than 25,000 streamers and over 1.5M viewers and has paid out more than $1M to streamer partners.
Hubla
Hubla is a Brazilian creator-economy platform that lets creators sell and manage digital products - online courses, memberships, mentorships, e-books and paid WhatsApp/Telegram communities - through an all-in-one checkout, payments and member-management system. Founded in 2020 as ChatPay and rebranded to Hubla in late 2021, the São Paulo company processes payments (PIX, card, boleto) and takes a fee on each sale. Backed by Kaszek and Y Combinator, it has grown into one of the country's larger 'Shopify for creators' players and is now leaning into AI sales agents.
Manychat
Manychat is a no-code chat marketing platform that lets businesses and creators automate conversations across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, SMS and email. Built around a visual drag-and-drop Flow Builder, it turns DMs, comments and messages into automated lead capture, sales and support flows. Founded in 2015 and now used by roughly 1.5 million customers in 170+ countries, Manychat sends billions of messages a year and has driven more than $10 billion in user sales. In 2025 it raised $140M led by Summit Partners to push deeper into AI-driven customer engagement.
Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Whop, a New York-based digital marketplace where people buy and sell software, courses, communities, and other digital products. He started building and selling iOS sneaker bots from his bedroom at 13 with future co-founder Cameron Zoub, ran through roughly two dozen side hustles, and launched Whop in 2021. The company reached a reported $1.6 billion valuation, processes billions in annual commerce, and Schwartz says it has minted over 650 millionaires. Backed by Peter Thiel, Insight Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Tether, he pitches a future where work is fun and money worries are obsolete.
Created by Humans
Created by Humans is a San Francisco startup building a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators sell the rights to their work for AI training, reference, and transformation - and get paid for it. Founded by former Scribd CEO Trip Adler, the platform lets rights holders claim their books (by ISBN or upload), set the terms under which AI companies may use them, and track usage and payments, positioning licensing as an alternative to lawsuits between creators and AI developers.
Misbah Uraizee
Misbah Uraizee is the co-founder and CEO of Nectar Social, the Palo Alto agentic operating system that runs brand conversations in DMs, comments and group chats at machine scale. A Yale biotech grad who spent a decade building product at Microsoft, Meta and Twitter - leading News Feed and creator monetization for billions of users - she left Meta in 2023 with her sister Farah to build Nectar. The company exited stealth in 2025 and raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures' Anthropic-backed Anthology Fund in May 2026, powering more than 10 million conversations a week for brands like e.l.f. Beauty, Figma and Liquid Death.
Hovhannes Kuloghlyan
Hovhannes Kuloghlyan is a co-founder and Head of Operations at Wirestock, a San Francisco-based platform that sits at the intersection of the creator economy and AI data infrastructure. With a PhD in Cosmology from Yerevan Physics Institute and early career stints in blockchain development with Ripple, he transitioned into building one of the world's leading platforms for ethically sourced multimodal AI training data. Wirestock now serves over 700,000 creators globally and surpassed a $40M annual revenue run rate, closing a $23M Series A in May 2026. Kuloghlyan also chairs Grōksmith, a software design and development company with clients including PwC, the Ethereum Foundation, and UEFA.
Li Jin
Li Jin is a venture capitalist, writer, and creator who coined the term 'passion economy' and spent years investing in platforms that help individuals turn their passions into livelihoods. She served as a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), then founded Atelier Ventures, and later co-founded Variant Fund - raising over $450M to back web3 and ownership-driven platforms. An active creator herself, she writes 'Li's Newsletter' on Substack with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and co-hosted the Means of Creation podcast. In August 2024, she transitioned from General Partner to Advisor at Variant to pursue interests in education, innovation, and creative projects.