Venture capital was reserved for platforms like YouTube, Substack or Whatnot, not for the people publishing on them.
04/02/26
For most of the social era, creators were treated as inventory.
Brands bought posts. Startups bought reach.
Venture capital was reserved for platforms like YouTube, Substack or Whatnot, not for the people publishing on them.
That line is starting to blur.
Capital is now flowing into creator led businesses and, in some cases, into creators themselves. Dedicated creator funds and specialist investors are writing six figure cheques to founders who started as creators and are now building products, media companies and tools.
This does not turn every creator into a VC backed startup.
But it does create a new type of player:
The venture funded founder creator.
Their incentives and expectations look very different to a traditional influencer.
Why VCs Care About Creators Now
A few big shifts explain why investors are paying attention.
First, the market is big and still growing.
Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy could reach around 480 billion by 2027.
Some analyses expect creator driven markets to pass one trillion over the next decade as creators become a core go to market layer for many industries.
In the US alone, creator ad spend is on track to hit about 37 billion in 2025, growing around 26 percent year on year and several times faster than the wider media market.
Second, creators now sit at the centre of demand.
Investors describe the creator economy as a marketing layer that spans industries. Every company now needs an attention strategy. Creators are that attention infrastructure, especially in DTC, fintech, gaming and education.
Third, the business model now looks like SaaS or media rather than gig work.
When a creator adds subscriptions, products, community and affiliate revenue, their numbers start to look like a software or media business with recurring revenue, high gross margins and defensible IP and community.
At that point, the creator is no longer just distribution.
They are the kernel of a company.
Who Is Writing The Cheques And Into What
Most of the money still goes into creator economy startups that serve creators.
Recent examples include large raises for Substack, Beehiiv and Whatnot, plus infrastructure plays like ShopMy and a wave of AI tools built to scale the long tail of creators.
Alongside that, a smaller but important stream of capital now goes directly to creators or their companies.
Slow Ventures has a dedicated creator fund. Family offices and specialist funds are writing cheques in the 100k to 500k range into creator brands or revenue share deals.
That money usually lands in three types of business:
Creator branded product companies in CPG, fashion, wellness, education or software.
Media companies where the creator is the anchor talent.
B2B tools where the creator’s IP or audience is the unfair advantage.
What A Venture Backed Creator Business Looks Like
A venture backable creator business needs more than a big following.
One pattern is the media company thesis.
Here the creator is the face of a multi format brand. Think video, newsletter, podcast, events and maybe a membership. Revenue comes from advertising, sponsorship and IP licensing. The bet is that this media asset can scale beyond the individual.
Another pattern is the product company thesis.
Here the creator’s audience is the wedge into a category such as fitness, fintech, beauty or education. The business launches a product or platform for that niche and uses organic content as the main acquisition engine.
A third pattern is the platform or tool thesis.
The creator turns their workflow or frameworks into a SaaS product or marketplace. Their own audience is the first wave of users and the venture story is about scaling beyond that base.
In practice, venture money usually pays for hiring operators such as a COO, product and marketing leads or engineers, building or buying tech like apps and community platforms, launching new formats and verticals faster than cashflow allows, and expanding into new markets or categories.
The creator moves from solo operator to CEO of a small company.
Content is now one part of their job, not the whole job.
How VC Changes Creator and Brand Relationships
Once a creator is venture backed, the way they work with brands changes.
First, there is a cap table in the background.
Big decisions around long exclusivity, deep brand licensing or large revenue share deals may involve co founders and investors. That often means longer negotiation cycles, more formal diligence and tighter guardrails around brand fit.
Second, money is no longer the only constraint.
With hundreds of thousands or even a few million in the bank, a single 15k deal matters less. The founder creator optimises for strategic fit, opportunity cost and signalling. They ask whether this deal moves the product or long term brand forward, whether the time is better spent shipping a feature or raising the next round, and whether the partner helps the next fundraise story.
They can say no quickly and often do.
Third, brand deals turn into partnerships or investment.
Conversations shift towards anchor partnerships that underwrite a chunk of the P and L, product collaborations with shared upside and sometimes joint IP, and strategic investments where brands take a direct equity stake.
The brand stops acting like a media buyer and starts behaving like a strategic partner.
How Brands Can Show Up As Investors, Not Just Clients
There are three main plays for brands.
One is to take a small equity stake.
Where the strategic fit is obvious, a brand can join the round, invest a defined amount alongside VCs or creator funds, negotiate light information rights and clear collaboration rights, and treat the relationship as both marketing and a long term financial asset.
Another is to fund revenue sharing bets.
Instead of, or as well as equity, a brand can fund a new product line, content vertical or community experiment, take a percentage of revenue from that specific initiative for a fixed period, and use simple revenue based finance style structures. That ties spend to actual outcomes.
The third play is to become an anchor customer.
A brand commits to a multi year, multi six figure partnership that underwrites key parts of the creator business. This might mean a 12 to 36 month commitment rather than single campaigns, integration into content, community, events and product, and joint planning cycles where both sides align roadmaps. In return, the brand can negotiate category exclusivity, deeper integration and performance linked upside such as warrants or bonuses.
Risks On Both Sides
Venture capital is not free money.
For creators, there is dilution, extra pressure and potential loss of control.
Giving up equity reduces the upside if the business wins. Growth expectations and reporting add workload. Investor rights may limit certain decisions, including some brand collaborations.
For brands, structures are more complex than a normal SOW.
There is higher concentration risk when you bet heavily on a single creator led business. There is also the chance that the company pivots away from your category over time.
This is why many creator funds experiment with smaller cheques and founder friendly terms that sit somewhere between classic VC and simple sponsorship.
The 2026 Takeaway
Three things are happening at once.
Creator marketing budgets keep compounding. US spend is forecast around 37 billion in 2025 and heading toward the mid 40s by 2026.
The creator economy is marching toward half a trillion dollars in value over the next few years.
A growing slice of creators are turning into venture backed founders with products, teams and boards.
Most brands do not need to become VC funds.
They do need to update the mental model.
The smart moves are to spot which creators in your orbit are on the founder track, adapt deal structures so they feel more like co built initiatives and less like one off ads, and explore a small number of well structured investments or anchor deals where the logic is obvious.
When a creator has a cap table, a board deck and a product roadmap, you are not just buying reach. You are deciding whether to back a business.
If Sobio’s thesis is creator as founder, this is the frontier.
Not only helping brands work with creators, but helping them decide which creator founders to treat like the startups they already invest in.