Wonder

Research Outline

Prepared for Mike P. | Delivered September 10, 2020

Fintech for Content Creators

Goals

To inform a competitive analysis on the fintech space specific to companies that provide services in support of English-speaking content creators by identifying key industry players, including their name, their primary offering to content creators, funds raised to date, date(s) of fundraising efforts, valuation (or an appropriate estimate) and product launch date. Findings should be presented in a spreadsheet, and include the details of influencerbank.co, usestir.com, trykarat.com
 and spotter.la.

Early Findings

SpotterSpotter specializes in providing content creators with licensing/payment for existing content as well as upfront capital, ranging from $50,000 to $20,000,000.
The company and its associated products were launched in 2019.
Notably, publicly available information about Spotter's fundraising rounds and valuation is limited and somewhat contradictory.
However, available information from business data aggregators (e.g., PitchBook, Crunchbase) indicates that Spotter has raised between $20.6 million and $27.8 million
 across three rounds:
 Seed Round: August 30, 2019 (between $10.6 million to $17.8 million)
 Series A: September 30, 2019 (funds raised not publicly available)
 Other Early Stage VC: August 27, 2020 ($10 million)
Complete details are provided within the enclosed spreadsheet. 
KaratKarat provides credit cards that are specifically designed for "high-income online content creators." Notably, Karat's product uses an algorithm to assess an applicant's financial potential by evaluating social media reach, engagement levels and reported earnings. As such, Karat can offer more generous and/or flexible credit limits as well as customized rewards and benefits.
The company and its associated credit card product officially launched on June 25, 2020, after being founded in August 2019.
Also in June 2020, the company closed its first Seed Round of $4.6 million.
Complete details are provided within the enclosed spreadsheet. 
Other Fintechs for Content CreatorsChannelMeter recently closed a $4 million Seed Round to launch its new Creator Cash service, which will provide banking services designed for content creators.
Perhaps one of the more established fintechs serving content creators, Patreon operates an online platform that supports content creators in getting paid. This past February, the company also announced that it is entering the micro-loan business, wherein content creators will receive non-equity cash advances.
Availability of InformationThe first hour of research suggests that there are a variety of fintech organizations that specifically cater to content creators.
However, initial research also indicates that publicly available information about these fintech companies is relatively limited and, in some cases, conflicting, likely due to their relatively recent founding in many cases.
In order to balance the desire to provide comprehensive, accurate information about each fintech organization while maximizing the results produced within every research block, we recommend limiting future research on the requested details of each organization to the company's owned media channels (e.g., corporate website, LinkedIn account), business data aggregators (e.g., PitchBook, Crunchbase) and relevant media outlets (e.g., Bloomberg, TechCrunch).