ENTERTECH · CREATOR ECONOMY
CreatorFi raises $45 million (about 60.5 billion won) — advances of $500,000 to $5 million against Roblox and Spotify payouts, with roughly half of platform revenue taken back
CreatorFi has raised $45 million (about 60.5 billion won). The round mixes equity and debt. The equity was led by Escape Velocity (EV3), with Uncorrelated Ventures and Protagonist participating.
The debt was led by VerisFi Capital. Executives from State Street, JPMorgan Chase and Periscope came in as angels. Business Insider reported the round exclusively on Sept. 2, and the company issued a release the same day.
What the company treats as the source of repayment is the payout a creator receives from a platform each month. Roblox developer exchange proceeds, Spotify royalties, YouTube AdSense and TikTok Shop sales are all in scope.
Goldman Sachs has projected the creator economy at $250 billion (about 336 trillion won) in 2023, approaching $480 billion (about 646 trillion won) by 2027. Roblox paid creators more than $1 billion (about 1.345 trillion won) through its Developer Exchange (DevEx) program in the 12 months to the end of June 2025.
Production cost moved the other way. Billy Huang, CreatorFi's chief executive, told Business Insider in its Sept. 2 report: “It used to take hundreds of millions of dollars to publish a game that will make a couple million dollars a month, and now, in Roblox, in Fortnite, kids are doing it in their basement.” Capital did not follow that shift. Monthly cash coming in was not an item a bank credit committee recognized as collateral, and venture money asked for equity in the company.
The contract CreatorFi offers pays out $500,000 to $5 million (about 670 million to 6.7 billion won) up front. In return it takes a share of that platform's revenue, usually 50 percent. The contract carries a requirement to produce new intellectual property — a set number of new songs by a given date, for example. Where revenue is concentrated in one person, the company may require that person to take out life insurance.
New York-based, under 50 staff, spun out of a blockchain shop… advances of 6 to 24 months of AdSense
CreatorFi is based in New York. Its legal entity is Luna Market Inc, and its headcount is listed in the 11-to-50 band, according to Crunchbase. It has three co-founders: Billy Huang as chief executive, Jack Cameron as chief operating officer and Samuel Ko as chief experience officer.
The parent company is Insomnia Labs, which has built blockchain infrastructure for Coca-Cola, L'Oréal, Under Armour and the International Cricket Council. It carved creator lending out as a separate platform in July 2025. “Digital creators generate massive income through their content, yet banks still don't know how to underwrite these modern revenue streams,” Huang said in the release at the time.
The company's site lists four product lines. For YouTube creators it advances 6 to 24 months of AdSense earnings, with channels earning at least $2,500 (about 3.4 million won) a month in AdSense as the threshold. For music it advances against the royalty statements of artists and labels across the major streaming services. For gaming studios it offers facilities of $200,000 to $20 million and up (about 270 million to 26.9 billion won). Inventory financing sits alongside them. The $500,000-to-$5 million range Business Insider reported falls in the middle of that span.
Repayment is structured so no equity changes hands. The creator files a letter of direction with the platform, and repayment is deducted automatically from incoming earnings. If income falls, the payment falls with it, and the company says it requires no fixed monthly payment and no personal guarantee. Yoola, the network behind the first program, is a YouTube-official multi-channel network managing more than 1,200 creators; earnings data for its creators is visible to the partner, which made underwriting data easy to obtain.
Fandom tightness over subscriber count… “We really love creators that have a cult-like following”
Underwriting starts with how much a creator earns on a given platform, then moves to fan-engagement indicators. “We try to figure out what is the strength of the IP,” Huang told Business Insider. “We really love creators that have a cult-like following. They don't necessarily need to be big.” The release puts the same test in balance-sheet language: a song catalog, a well-operated game with an ecosystem, and a social channel with a loyal audience are assets with cash flows.
Companies funded so far include the music label Coasthill IV; Mythical Games, which developed “FIFA Rivals” with FIFA; and the YouTubers Lah Mike and The Danza Project. Mythical Games is itself a venture-backed company that raised $150 million (about 202 billion won) in a Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 at a $1.25 billion (about 1.68 trillion won) valuation. The borrower list is not confined to individual creators. CreatorFi lists more than 30 industry partners, among them CAA Gaming, IP Ventures, Astronic Media, Yoola, Riches & Saints and Akashic Studios.
Co-founder Jack Cameron told Business Insider the round “shows a maturity in capital markets to acknowledge creators as businesses.” Salvador Gala, managing partner at Escape Velocity, cited CreatorFi's data-driven approach to evaluating creators as the reason for the investment. He said creators earn more than $50 billion (about 67 trillion won) a year through the dominant digital platforms.
From a $12 million credit facility to $45 million in a year… up to $100 million more available
CreatorFi started in July 2025. Insomnia Labs launched it with a credit facility of $12 million (about 16.1 billion won), backed by Kamui Finance, Intrinsic Capital and partners. The first program was a $5 million (about 6.7 billion won) bond program for creators on the Yoola network. Tokenization of the underlying receivables ran on the Avalanche blockchain, and advances were paid in stablecoins that creators converted to local currency through Coinbase Offramp.
The new round is more than three times that facility. The company says it can draw up to $100 million (about 134.5 billion won) beyond it. Because debt makes up more than half the structure, the money goes into writing more advance contracts rather than into equity positions.
Spotter sits on YouTube alone, CreatorFi across platforms… and it does not buy music catalogs
Funding creators is already a contested market. Spotter raised $200 million (about 269 billion won) to license YouTubers' back catalogs, working with creators such as MrBeast and Dude Perfect. When Amazon invested in 2024, Spotter had paid creators more than $940 million (about 1.26 trillion won) in total, Variety reported in September 2024. In music, beatBread and Sound Royalties have been advancing money to artists.
Spotter has widened its footing. Its site now calls the company the leader in “Creator TV,” offering creators upfront capital, revenue-share licensing deals and brand partnerships together. It states more than $1 billion (about 1.345 trillion won) invested in creators and more than 43 billion monthly views across its network, and it runs Spotter Studio, a set of AI-assisted creative tools.
beatBread sizes an advance from a Spotify ID. Recoupment comes only from streaming and SoundExchange income, no interest accrues, and income reverts entirely to the artist once the advance is recouped. Its stated floor is about 10,000 monthly Spotify listeners and $80 to $100 (about 110,000 to 130,000 won) a month in distributor income. Others take equity: Slow Ventures launched a $60 million (about 80.7 billion won) creator fund in February 2025, writing checks of $1 million to $3 million (about 1.3 to 4 billion won) to niche creators intent on building companies.
Models for supplying capital to creators. Sources: company websites and releases, Business Insider, Forbes, Tubefilter
CreatorFi frames its difference from Spotter as the number of platforms it looks at: not YouTube alone, but revenue across several. In music it does not acquire catalog rights. It advances against future earnings and requires new IP in return. Andy Cloyd, chief executive of the creator marketing platform Superfiliate and a former venture capitalist, told Business Insider that a funding gap remains for the early- to mid-stage companies CreatorFi backs, so more capital entering the space is welcome.
Terms beyond the money are part of the pitch. “We want to be able to vertically integrate and say, ‘Hey, not only can you do this with your copyright and your royalties, we can also extend you into the physical world and help promote you within our ecosystem,’” Huang said. When a musician it backed went on tour, the company tapped other creators in its portfolio for promotion.
From buying copyrights to lending against payouts… what the $1.6 billion Hipgnosis sale left behind
Capital reached creators two ways until now: buying the copyright or catalog outright, or taking equity. Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the standard-bearer of the acquisition model, suspended its dividend in October 2023, and that same month 83.2 percent of shareholders voted against continuing as an investment trust. Results were delayed after concerns that internal valuations sat materially above market transaction values. Blackstone acquired the fund in April 2024 at a $1.6 billion (about 2.152 trillion won) enterprise value, and it was renamed Recognition Music Group in March 2025.
CreatorFi's method fits neither track. It buys no copyright and takes no equity; it takes a share of what the platform settles. What secures the loan is the payout stream, not the work, and the underwriting file already exists. Roblox records developer exchange proceeds creator by creator, Spotify logs plays and royalties track by track, YouTube posts AdSense payments channel by channel. Credit information banks never managed to build has been accumulating inside the platforms, and it is now being read as underwriting data.
Lending against recurring revenue was tried first in software. Pipe, which traded subscription revenue, was valued at $2 billion (about 2.69 trillion won) in 2021, but its three co-founders resigned at once in November 2022, citing inexperience, and the company later cut staff (Forbes, Nov. 23, 2022). A payout is past performance; repayment happens in the future. The new-IP requirement in CreatorFi's contracts, and the life-insurance clause where revenue sits with one person, are devices for narrowing that gap.
Korean solo-media income filings reached 1.79 trillion won… the payout data accumulates but is not underwritten
Korea's National Tax Service (국세청) counted 24,797 solo-media creators filing income for the 2023 tax year, with total income of 1.7861 trillion won (about $1.33 billion). In 2019 the figures were 1,327 filers and 101.1 billion won (about $75 million) — an 18-fold rise in filers and a 17-fold rise in income over four years. The average was about 72 million won (about $54,000) per filer, and the top 1 percent, 247 people, reported 327.1 billion won (about $243 million), or 18.3 percent of the total (Kyunghyang Shinmun (경향신문), Jan. 30, 2025).
Much of that income is money platforms settle every month — the same kind of data CreatorFi underwrites. No Korean product treats that stream as a source of repayment. The content valuation, completion guarantee and content-IP guarantee programs run by the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA, 한국콘텐츠진흥원) assess the work in development and the company making it. The monthly payout of an individual creator or a small studio does not fit that frame.
Building the same product in Korea starts with access to payout data. CreatorFi partnered with Yoola first because that network already held earnings data for more than 1,200 creators. The equivalent position in Korea is held by multi-channel networks (MCNs), music distributors and webtoon platforms. Repayment also has to be handled automatically at the settlement step; without a letter of direction, with creators paying back directly, collection costs rise.
K-pop (케이팝) and webtoons (웹툰) line up with the test CreatorFi describes. The company says it weighs the tightness of the fandom over its size, and that a modest subscriber base is no obstacle where repeat purchase is visible. First-week album sales (초동), merchandise repurchase rates and paid-episode transaction histories are the Korean equivalents of those indicators. In genres where fandom spending recurs, purchase history carries more information than channel size.
On the other side of those conditions is the cost: handing over half of platform revenue and delivering new IP by a fixed date, in exchange for keeping the copyright. For Korean creators and agencies weighing this route, the recovery share and the deadline on the production obligation matter more than the size of the advance.
Sources
· Lucia Moses, “CreatorFi raised $45 million to bet on creators with ‘cult-like’ audiences,” Business Insider, Sept. 2, 2026
· “CreatorFi Raises $45 Million to Fund the Next Generation of Independent Media,” CreatorFi release via EQS News, Sept. 2, 2026
· “Insomnia Labs lands $12M to launch CreatorFi,” Tech Funding News, July 9, 2025
· “Insomnia Labs Raises $12M and Launches CreatorFi to Enable Stablecoin Credit for Digital Creators,” Insomnia Labs release via GlobeNewswire, July 9, 2025
· CreatorFi product and terms pages, creatorfi.finance
· CreatorFi (Insomnia Labs) company profile — legal entity, headquarters, founders, headcount, Crunchbase
· “Mythical Games Raises $150M in Series C Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz at $1.25B Valuation,” Business Wire, Nov. 4, 2021
· “The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027,” Goldman Sachs Research
· “Roblox creators will now earn 8.5% more from Developer Exchange,” PocketGamer.biz
· “Amazon Invests in Spotter, Which Has Paid Out More Than $940 Million to Creators,” Variety, 2024
· KOCCA (한국콘텐츠진흥원) financial support notices — content valuation, completion guarantee, content-IP guarantee, kocca.kr
· “Three Cofounders Of $2 Billion Fintech Pipe Resign Abruptly, Citing Inexperience,” Forbes, Nov. 23, 2022
· Hipgnosis Songs Fund / Recognition Music Group — dividend suspension, shareholder vote, Blackstone acquisition at $1.6bn enterprise value
· “Top 1% of YouTubers earned 1.3 billion won on average,” Kyunghyang Shinmun (경향신문), Jan. 30, 2025 (National Tax Service solo-media creator income filings)
· National Tax Service (국세청) guidance for solo-media creators, nts.go.kr
· Spotter company website — Creator TV positioning, investment and payout figures, spotter.com (accessed Sept. 8, 2026)
· beatBread artist funding pages, beatbread.com
· “Slow Ventures announces $60 million fund to back creator businesses,” Tubefilter, Feb. 12, 2025
· Seoul Money Brokerage Services mid-market rate, Sept. 8, 2026