More than 165 million creators joined the Creator Economy since 2020. Creators come in various forms – from artists, designers to musicians to bloggers to TikTok dancers. Essentially anyone who publishes original content and creations online is a creator. The creator economy empowers individuals to leverage their skills and creativity to create content and build a business online. It is reinventing how people approach work and entrepreneurship.
Gen Z and Millennials are more entrepreneurial, autonomous, and online than previous generations. With the combination of these characteristics, they are more motivated to pursue non-traditional careers such as being a full-time creator – igniting the rise of the creator economy. According to a recent study, 17% of creators are business owners and 39% aspire to become a business owner one day. Furthermore, the influence that social media and the internet has on our society’s cultural zeitgeist has propelled the rise of the creator economy.
In this article, we highlight 10 creator economy startups in Europe that you should watch out for. The startups we highlight in this list are helping creators to better engage their audiences and also monetise and distribute their content. As the creator economy grows, we should expect to continue to see new novel solutions for creator monetisation.
Bento is helping creatives to showcase their creativity with their all-in-one link-in-bio solution. Their product has a slick interface and gives their users optimal modularity to customise their Bento profiles. Bento is enabling a creative revolution and believes that creatives need more than a CV to showcase their value. Bento is based in Berlin and launched in 2022. They have raised a total of €1.5 million and were part of the renowned Sequoia Arc program, a company builder program for selected European startups powered by Sequoia Capital.
Loudly is a platform for creators to discover and customize music with the power of AI. They saw there was a gap in the market for creators to access customizable royalty-free music with a few user inputs such as the desired genre or length of track. Loudly’s music catalogue is currently already counting over 150,000 songs. EU-Startups sat down and spoke with Rory Kenny, Loudly’s founder back in 2021 to share more about his journey of building Loudly. Loudly was founded in 2020. They are based in Berlin with 34 employees.
Dealflow is a Copenhagen-based startup building payment infrastructure for creators where creators can send an invoice to a brand and receive the payment on the same day. Currently, they’re a wallet for creators. Their vision to be a financial platform for creators and brands where they get paid / pay and get funded and build the financial system for the creator economy. The founder, Seb, was inspired to launch Dealflow when he was content creator and struggled to get paid by companies. We recently caught up with Seb to chat about Dealflow and their growth and being a young entrepreneur.
Komi is building tools for creators to setup their ultimate “home” / landing page into a fully-personalised hub to engage and monetise their audience. Komi enables creators to consolidate their content into one space and also includes analytics for creators. They have plans to roll out more fan engagement and monetization tools. Komi has onboarded some notable names like Lizzo, Elton John, and Idris Elba. Based in London with an additional base in Los Angeles, USA. Komi has raised a €4.5 million seed round led by Contour Venture Partners.
Passionfroot lets creators handle sponsorships, collaboration requests, bookings, and payments all-in-one platform. They are helping creators to streamline their work by freeing up time that they otherwise would have spent juggling admin. Founded in 2021, they are based in Berlin with 16 employees. They raised a pre-seed round back in December 2021 of €3 million led by Creandum with notable creators such as Ali Abdaal and Marina Mogilko participating in their round.
25superstars is a Vienna-based startup helping brands to partner with content creators to produce engaging content. They are helping D2C and B2C brands to save time and money, while also helping content creators to generate additional income. They initially launched their platform with 25 creators (hence their company name). Now, they have worked with 500+ brands and 5000+ creators. Their platform uses AI and ML technology to analyse various data-points from social media to advise their clients on their content creation strategy. Founded in 2021; they have raised a total of €474k in pre-seed funding.
Blokur is building a platform that connects rights holders and creators. In the music industry, there’s a long-standing problem of complexity and delays in payments that go to various parties for streams. Blokur is solving this by helping musicians and rights holders to get paid what they should, when they should. Their platform processes 70 million songs and trillions of streams. They are currently London-based with 18 employees and have raised €1.7 million.
Twirl is helping brands produce video UGC (user-generated content) through their platform. With their tech-enabled approach and vetted creator network, they help speed up the process for brands looking to work with creators. Founded in 2022; Twirl is based in London, backed by Antler, and currently has 7 employees.
Snipfeed is on a mission to help micro and macro creators to monetise their social media platform through a link-in-bio solution. Creators can sell their merchandise and services including exclusive content, tipping, and live streams. Instead of creators using various platforms to enable these monetization opportunities, Snipfeed enables these offerings all within their platform. Founded in 2020, based in Paris and Los Angeles, they currently have 30 employees. Their most recent fundraise was announced in 2021 where they raised €4.2 million.
Throne is building creator commerce infrastructure. They currently have two products: a wishlist (creators can share a wishlist with their fans and fans can purchase products for their creators off the wishlist) and a storefront product (creators can add their favourite products and shops to their storefront, creators can earn from related purchases). Throne has built relationships with 250,000 creators and hundreds of partner brands. They were founded in 2021 and have offices in Berlin and also in the US.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
