The company teaching creators to stop renting their audience

In 2014, two people with a hosting bill kept fielding the same question from customers: how do I sell my videos on my own site, on my own terms, without handing the relationship to someone else? PJ Taei and Nikita Savrov could not find a clean answer, so they built one. That answer became Uscreen, and it has spent the years since arguing with the entire logic of the creator economy - that reach is the prize. Uscreen's counter-argument is that ownership is.

The pitch is unglamorous and, for a lot of creators, a relief. Instead of chasing the next viral spike, you take the audience you already have and give it somewhere to pay you. Uscreen hands a creator a branded website, native apps for phones and TVs, a paywall, live streaming, a place for the community to talk, and the billing plumbing underneath - all pointed at one outcome: a subscription business the creator controls.

It has worked at a scale that surprised even the people who wouldn't fund it. Creators on the platform have now earned more than a billion dollars. Uscreen's viewers number in the tens of millions. And after roughly a decade of turning a profit without a cent of outside money, the company took a $150 million check in 2025 - not to stay alive, but to go faster.

01 / The problemRenting an audience is a bad lease

Most creators do not own their audiences. They rent them. The follower count lives on someone else's platform, the reach is decided by someone else's algorithm, and the payout - when there is one - arrives after someone else takes a cut. It is a workable arrangement until the day the rules change, and the rules always change eventually.

Uscreen sells the exit from that lease. A creator's members land on the creator's own site and open the creator's own app. There is no feed deciding who sees the new video, no ad market setting the price, no middle layer between the person making the work and the person paying for it. That is the whole product thesis, and the new leadership says it in almost those exact words.

The distinction matters most on the day something goes wrong. A policy update, a demonetization wave, a change to how a recommendation engine weights a topic - any of these can erase a livelihood built on borrowed reach, and the creator finds out at the same time everyone else does. A subscriber list and a paid app don't move when the algorithm does. That is a less thrilling asset than a viral clip, and a far more durable one.

02 / What it doesOne login instead of a dozen tabs

Before a tool like this, running a video business meant stitching together a hosting service here, a payment processor there, a membership plugin, a separate app vendor, an email tool, and an analytics dashboard that never quite agreed with the others. Taei's original observation was that everything on the market was ad hoc. Uscreen's job was to bring it together.

Today the platform bundles the parts a video business actually needs. The pieces are boring individually and useful together - which is precisely the point.

Sitting under all of it is an analytics layer that tracks watch-time by device, best-performing videos, churn and revenue - the numbers a subscription business lives and dies on. The plans start around $49 a month and climb with the size of the operation, which is the tell that this is software sold to businesses, not a platform taking a slice of the content.

03 / Who uses itYoga teachers, a debt-show host, and a movie star

The customer list reads like a cross-section of the internet's most durable second acts. Yoga with Adriene, one of the most recognizable names in online fitness, runs a membership here. Jazzercise, a brand older than most of its members' phones, moved online with it. Caleb Hammer, who built a following dissecting strangers' finances, launched a paid tier called Hammer Elite. The Theorist team turned its YouTube universe into a membership called TheoryVerse. Keke Palmer built Practice by Palmer.

What they share is not a genre. It is a moment - the point where an audience is big enough and loyal enough that the smartest move is to stop growing it and start owning it. More than 4,000 creators are actively building on the platform, and the total who have passed through it runs well past 11,000.

Fitness turned out to be the flagship, and the reason is practical. A workout, a yoga flow or a dance class is content people return to on a schedule, which is exactly the behavior a subscription rewards. Education followed the same logic: a lesson library is worth paying to keep access to. Entertainment came later, once the native TV apps made it plausible for a creator to sit on the same living-room screen as the streaming giants - a place a social feed can never quite reach.

04 / The differenceNot a feed, not a course tool, not a tip jar

Uscreen operates in a crowded room. Patreon and a tip jar handle memberships. Kajabi, Teachable and Thinkific handle courses. Vimeo OTT and Brightcove handle video hosting and apps. Mighty Networks and Circle handle community. Each does a slice well.

Uscreen's argument is that a serious video business shouldn't have to run four vendors and reconcile four dashboards. It leans hardest on the two pieces rivals treat as add-ons: real streaming infrastructure and native TV apps. A membership tool can host a video. It generally cannot put a creator's catalog on the living-room screen as its own Apple TV or Roku app in a couple of months. That living-room reach is where Uscreen plants its flag.

05 / The businessBootstrapped for a decade, then the check

The strategy story is the part founders tend to underline. When Taei and Savrov started, no investor wanted to bet on creator-owned businesses; the market didn't believe creators were businesses yet. So the two bootstrapped, stayed profitable, and grew the company to a reported thirty-million-dollar run rate the slow way - one paying customer at a time, out of a headquarters in Washington, DC.

Then the market caught up to the idea. In February 2025, growth-equity firm PSG put $150 million into Uscreen, the company's first institutional capital. The money is aimed at the pieces the platform wants to widen - better mobile and TV apps, deeper marketing and community tools, sharper analytics. A few months later, Allison Yazdian - a Stanford MBA who had led the creator business at LTK - stepped in as CEO, with Taei moving to executive chairman and Savrov staying on as CTO.

06 / The marketAn ownership problem inside a $250B economy

The creator economy is now estimated at roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars, and most of that value flows through platforms the creators don't control. That gap - a huge economy built on rented ground - is the market Uscreen sits inside. Its bet is that as more creators mature from personalities into businesses, more of them will want the plumbing of a business: their own storefront, their own apps, their own subscriber list, their own numbers.

Whether that thesis carries the company through its next phase is the open question, and the $150 million is essentially a wager on the answer. For now, Uscreen's position is unusual and clear. It is the quiet infrastructure company that spent ten years being early, stayed profitable while the world caught up, and is now trying to become the default place a video creator goes when they decide to own the thing they built.