Your community, your wave. The social app that decided creators should get paid on day one.
THE MARK. A wave, folded into an app icon. It has ridden the Italian charts to #1 and now sits on more than three million phones - a small blue shape carrying a large promise about who gets paid.
It is an ordinary evening and somewhere a creator with a few thousand followers checks a balance that is not zero. She did not sign a brand deal. She did not hit a mythical million-view threshold. She posted, people watched, people tapped a Super Like, and the app - Waveful - sent half the money her way. This is the small, almost boring moment the whole company was built to produce.
Most social apps are generous with reach and stingy with cash. They hand you an audience and keep the register. Waveful runs the trade in reverse: build a real community around a passion, and the platform splits the revenue with you - 50/50 - calculated by an algorithm that watches views, likes, comments and Super Likes rather than a quarterly whim.
That word - actually - is doing a lot of work. It is a quiet dig at every platform that promised creators the world and delivered a tip jar. Waveful's wager is that if you pay the people who make the thing worth opening, they will make more of it, and the rest takes care of itself.
Waveful is a mobile app on iOS and Android. You post photos, videos and go live. Fans back you directly. Communities and challenges do the rest.
Fans send Super Likes to support the creators they love. Those taps feed straight into your share of revenue - no gatekeeper, no ad-broker skim.
AI-assisted discovery helps you find and grow authentic communities around a passion, rather than shouting into a feed and hoping.
Join community challenges or launch your own. It is engagement as a game - with real earning opportunities attached.
Live streaming turns followers into a room. Real-time connection is where fandom - and support - tends to spike.
An optional subscription (about $6.99/month) adds extra features for the power users who want them.
Badges, ambassador paths and community-based growth reward the people who show up and bring others with them.
One number, plainly stated. Half of the revenue a creator generates comes back to the creator, allocated by an engagement-weighted algorithm.
Steven and Dennis Motta are siblings who have been making consumer products since before they could legally sign a contract.
Earned his first money as a developer at age 9, building Minecraft mods that passed 2M+ downloads. Over a decade in mobile consumer products later, he runs product and company. He was among the youngest founders in his a16z Speedrun batch.
Holds a Master's in Computer Science and Engineering with an AI specialization. He previously shipped a product with more than 50 million downloads - useful experience when your app has to grow by a million users in a week.
There is a chart inside Waveful that looks like a mistake. In a single week during its a16z Speedrun run, monthly active users climbed from roughly 200,000 to 1.2 million. The app reached the top of Italy's charts. Downloads crossed three million inside six months, with monthly growth north of 200% - and it did it on a plain B2C model, no enterprise sales team, no ad giant behind it.
Being the only fully Italian company in the batch made the story irresistible; being the fastest-growing one made it real. The reward was a term sheet.
Led by a16z Speedrun, with a roster of funds and angels. Earmarked for US expansion - a target of 500,000 American users in 12 months - plus AI features and a handful of engineering, growth and marketing hires.
The Motta brothers start building a social app that treats creators as partners, not inventory.
Selected for Cohort 004 - the only fully Italian startup, and the youngest founding team in the group.
200K to 1.2M monthly users, #1 in Italy, 3M+ downloads inside six months.
Closes a seed round to fund a San Francisco base and a US expansion push.
"Being selected by a16z Speedrun as the only Italian company - and becoming the fastest-growing startup in the programme - was an incredible recognition."
The best way to understand a social app is to watch it. Search results for the founders and product below.
Return to that ordinary evening. The creator who checked a non-zero balance is not an anomaly on Waveful - she is the whole point. Multiply her by a few million, split the pot down the middle, and you get a social network whose success is mechanically tied to the people making it worth using.
Whether the 50/50 promise scales cleanly to a US audience is the open question - and the reason a16z wrote a check to find out. But the change is already visible in the smallest unit: a phone that lights up not with another notification to ignore, but with money that used to belong to somebody else.