Tagged: ugc
18 results
CreativeMode
CreativeMode is a no-code, AI-powered platform that lets Minecraft players build their own mods by describing what they want in plain English. It generates ready-to-play mobs, items, blocks, weapons and structures for both Java and Bedrock editions, then lets creators publish, share and compete with them. Founded in 2024 by three ex-Crusoe engineers and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, CreativeMode says players have made more than 450,000 mods on the platform.
Duel Tech
Duel is a London-founded B2B SaaS company that runs a Brand Advocacy Platform, helping consumer retail brands recruit, activate and scale tens of thousands of customers, creators, fans, employees and ambassadors into a measurable word-of-mouth growth channel. Founded in 2017 by adventurer-turned-entrepreneur Paul Archer and games developer Naio Tsarouchis, and certified as a B Corp, Duel powers advocacy programs for brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and Pandora, and raised a $16M Series A in September 2025.
LoudCrowd
LoudCrowd is an Austin-based software company that helps direct-to-consumer brands turn creators and customers into a measurable sales channel. Its all-in-one creator commerce platform runs influencer, affiliate, ambassador, and user-generated-content programs, spins up branded on-domain creator storefronts, and layers on AI agents that automate discovery, outreach, and program management - shifting the focus from reach-based vanity metrics to attributable revenue.
SelfMade
SelfMade is a New York-based AI creative company behind Skipper, a creative intelligence platform that scrapes customer reviews, Reddit threads, Amazon feedback and social comments to build audience personas and generate on-brand performance ads at scale. Originally founded in 2015 as an Instagram commerce app, the company pivoted through agency work before rebuilding around AI-driven creative production for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands.
Gary Garofalo
Gary Garofalo is the CEO and co-founder of LoudCrowd, an Austin-based software company that turns brand creators and influencers into measurable revenue channels. His platform builds native creator storefronts on a brand's own e-commerce site, aiming to make social commerce as mainstream as third-party tools like LTK or TikTok Shop. A former Deloitte consultant with an economics degree from Wesleyan, Garofalo has led LoudCrowd to work with brands including Gymshark, Boohoo, Kyte Baby and Dolce Vita.
Linklabs
Linklabs (branded 'Remix The Web') is a Sao Paulo-based software platform that helps brands, publishers and agencies collect, moderate, display and analyze social content from across the web. It aggregates user-generated content from 15+ social networks, review sites and messaging apps into curated social walls, website hubs, event projections and ad units - with built-in content-rights management and campaign analytics to turn peer recommendations into measurable marketing conversions.
Statusphere
Statusphere is an AI-powered influencer marketing platform that helps enterprise retailers and consumer brands turn micro-influencers into a scalable, measurable growth channel. It automates the messy parts of creator programs - matching, product fulfillment, compliance, content rights and reporting - so brands can generate authentic user-generated content at scale and improve product discovery across social and AI-powered search. Founded by Kristen Wiley in 2016, the company has powered tens of thousands of creator collaborations for brands including Fenty Beauty, Express and Kendo Brands.
Tripo AI
Tripo AI, built by the startup VAST, is a generative-AI platform that turns text prompts and images into production-ready 3D models in seconds. Its Tripo Studio app and REST API cover the full 3D pipeline - generation, texturing, rigging, retopology, segmentation and stylization - and are used by more than 6.5 million creators and roughly 90,000 developers. Founded in 2023 by former MiniMax co-founder Simon Song, the company is pushing from single 3D assets toward interactive, persistent 'world models' and has raised close to $400 million from backers including Alibaba and Baidu Ventures.
Paul Archer
Paul Archer is the founder and CEO of Duel, a London-based brand advocacy SaaS platform that helps global brands like Charlotte Tilbury, Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch turn customers, creators and fans into a measurable growth channel. Before software, Archer drove a 1992 London black cab around the world, breaking two Guinness World Records and writing a best-selling book about it. He co-founded Duel in 2017 with viral games developer Naio Tsarouchis; the company raised a $16M Series A in September 2025 co-led by Molten Ventures and Bright Pixel.
SmartCustomer
SmartCustomer (formerly Sitejabber) is a San Francisco reviews platform that helps buyers spot trustworthy online businesses and helps businesses collect, manage, and surface authentic customer reviews. Born in 2007 out of a National Science Foundation grant to fight online fraud, it has grown into a two-sided marketplace of trust - said to have helped 200M+ buyers and gathered more than 25M reviews across 140K+ businesses - and now positions verified reviews as fuel for AEO/GEO visibility in AI answer engines like ChatGPT.
Kennan Frost
Kennan Frost is the founder and CEO of Icon, a New York-based AI advertising company backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Previously he solo-founded Skio, a Shopify subscriptions startup that reached $32M ARR and a $105M cash exit. A former top-200 North American League of Legends player who dropped out of college at 19, he is one of the most outspoken solo-founder operators in consumer tech today.
Astrocade
Astrocade is an AI-powered social gaming platform that lets anyone build, remix, share and play casual games from natural-language prompts - no coding required. A coordinated team of generative AI agents handle art, sound, mechanics and UI, turning a sentence into a playable game in minutes. Co-founded by AI researchers Amir and Ali Sadeghian alongside Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, the company is backed by Sequoia, Google, NVIDIA and others.
Paul Benigeri
Paul Benigeri is the co-founder and CEO of Archive, an AI-powered influencer and user-generated-content marketing platform he launched with Geoffrey Woo in 2021. A Stanford computer-science graduate raised in Paris, he spent his early career writing code at First Round Capital and RockMelt before scaling growth and engineering at the nutrition company HVMN. Archive grew from a Shopify app that auto-captured Instagram Stories into a platform used by brands like Quest, Allbirds and Hexclad, raising roughly $12M-plus and reaching a reported $100M valuation in about 18 months while staying lean and remote-first.
Aoife Quinn
Aoife Quinn is the Co-Founder of Eco Lens Marketing, a Dubai-based social media agency that helps purpose-driven brands grow through strategic content and influencer marketing. A University of Limerick graduate who relocated from Ireland to the UAE, she has built a reputation for actionable marketing frameworks - from her 10-step TikTok Shop launch strategy to her content mix model - and was selected as a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2025 awards.
Graham Gaylor
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
VRChat Inc.
VRChat is a free-to-use social virtual reality platform where millions of people gather every month inside worlds built almost entirely by the community. Founded in 2014 by Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey, the company has turned a Reddit-recruited Oculus DK1 experiment into one of the largest user-generated virtual worlds on the internet, with concurrent users routinely topping 100,000 and a creator economy now monetized through a digital currency, subscriptions, and a marketplace.
Yash Kewalramani
Yash Kewalramani is the co-founder of Cherry App, a Bengaluru-based social commerce startup that pays Instagram creators cashback for shopping and sharing. Backed by All In Capital, Cherry lets users earn 30-70% cashback by posting about brands on social media - turning everyday shoppers into micro-marketers. A Swarthmore College mathematics and economics graduate, Yash previously worked as a product manager at Jupiter and at Adappt Intelligence before launching Cherry in 2024 with co-founders Sharnam Singhwal and Samarth Mahapatra.
Chad Hurley
Chad Meredith Hurley (born January 24, 1977, Reading, PA) is an American entrepreneur and tech visionary best known as the co-founder and first CEO of YouTube, which he built alongside Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005 and sold to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion - just 18 months after launch. Armed with a Fine Arts degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania rather than a computer science background, Hurley's design instincts shaped YouTube's iconic UI and pioneered the embeddable video player that fueled viral growth; he had previously designed the original PayPal logo during his job interview. After stepping down from YouTube in 2010, he co-founded AVOS Systems and MixBit, launched the sports gaming platform GreenPark Sports (which raised $53M+), and in 2023 founded EyeTell, an AI-powered video script generation startup. He holds minority ownership stakes in the Golden State Warriors (NBA), LA Football Club (MLS), and Leeds United (EPL), and received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2019. Estimated at $700-800 million in net worth, Hurley remains a prolific investor and quiet force in Silicon Valley, famously reclusive despite his outsized impact on how the world creates and consumes video.