The resources brands and agencies consume to discover creators, negotiate rates, and manage campaigns can drain budgets and staff time before content creation even begins. This inefficiency has led many companies to recycle the same small pool of creators, ultimately reducing audience engagement and campaign effectiveness.

Julio Cerne Chaves, founder and CEO of XrossWorld, has identified and named this problem: “creator acquisition cost” (CAC). Founded in 2018, the Los Angeles-based company developed an AI-powered SaaS platform specifically targeting advertising agencies and brands working with influencers, believing that automating the discovery and negotiation process could dramatically reduce costs while expanding creator options.

“Most agencies and brands are using at least one, but some even three platforms,” explains Julio about subscription costs. “And how many people in your team are DMing and emailing influencers to find out the best rates? All of that cost is your creator acquisition cost—even before you pay the creator.”

Most agencies attempt to minimize creator acquisition costs by maintaining a limited roster of talent. However, as Julio notes, this approach creates another problem: “If an influencer is always posting about the same brand, the audience gets separated from the message. It becomes too salesy.”

Before founding XrossWorld, Julio built and sold several businesses, including the College of Sports & Fitness, an educational institution that grew from a $250,000 investment to over $50 million in lifetime revenue and enrolled more than 10,000 students.

The AI-Powered Solution

XrossWorld’s platform addresses CAC through automation of the entire creator discovery and management process, powered by AI models trained on an extensive database of creator information. “We’ve collected over $35 million worth of rate cards across multiple different influencers,” Julio reveals. This data powers three core AI capabilities that form the foundation of the platform.

The first capability determines fair market value for creators based on first-party data. Rather than relying on arbitrary rate cards or gut feelings, XrossWorld’s AI analyzes a creator’s actual audience quality, engagement rates, and historical performance to establish what Julio calls “a fair market value of an influencer based on the data.”

The second capability, “intelligent cohorting,” helps brands optimize their campaign budgets by analyzing the potential impact of different creator combinations. “If a brand has a budget of $100,000, they could spend all of it on one creator and see what happens. Or they could spend it on a thousand creators,” Julio explains. The AI determines which approach would generate better results based on campaign objectives and audience demographics.

The third AI feature focuses on content approval, allowing companies to “quickly scan all of their content to make sure it’s brand safe before it goes live,” which is particularly valuable for large campaigns involving numerous creators.

The workflow itself is straightforward. When an agency or brand submits a brief—a process that takes less than five minutes—the system automatically identifies matching creators from a worldwide network of 450M+ influencers, vets them, and invites them to bid on the campaign within a suggested range based on XrossWorld’s proprietary data.

“We help buyers source the best creators for the lowest cost to acquire them,” Julio explains. The brand or agency can view all bidders, complete with analytics on their audience quality and predicted performance, and hire them with a single click—all for a flat 2.9% fee of the creator’s rate.

The Issue of Creator Payment

Beyond streamlining the discovery process, XrossWorld has reimagined how creators get paid. In many cases, influencers routinely wait months for payment, but the platform ensures creators receive compensation within 30 days of completing their deliverables.

“I have some creator friends that haven’t been paid for 12 months still,” Julio notes with concern. “We’ve got to start to think the creators are their own business people, and they need to get paid quicker.”

The platform’s payment process is designed for simplicity and reliability. Once a creator completes their campaign deliverables, they simply hit a button to cash out directly to their bank account.

“I see a future in which our platform is as quick as the creator to cash out as soon as they finish the first deliverable,” Julio envisions. “Once the brief gets approved, you get 25% of your cash immediately. I want to see a future where creators are getting paid almost instantaneously.”

XrossWorld’s Team

What’s Next for Creator Economics?

With XrossWorld’s platform now in private beta and growing steadily, Julio sees the company becoming “the media measurement and data analytics tool for the creator economy. Just like Nielsen did for TV advertising,” aiming to create a benchmark that defines fair market value in the creator economy.

Currently, the platform serves both agencies (80% of their customer base) and brands (20%), ranging from small boutique agencies handling around $500,000 in influencer hiring to larger operations managing up to $40 million.

For agencies working with creators, Julio offers straightforward advice: “Start testing today. Don’t wait until later, as you will never know when you’ll need the right audience and influencer. You need to test it today with a small budget. And then when you need it, you can scale it.”

The name “XrossWorld” itself reflects the company’s mission. “The ‘X’ refers to a treasure hunt, ‘X marks the spot,’” Julio explains. “But ‘crossworld’ refers to the complications of doing this at scale. It’s like trying to cross worlds in a ship. And we want to simplify that.”

Looking ahead, XrossWorld aims to build a detailed data infrastructure that makes influencer marketing more transparent, efficient, and equitable for all parties. “Our goal right now is to provide our technology for free. The only cost is the creator cost,” Julio says. “We aim to build the infrastructure of that data layer so that we can help people make better money. And that’s our focus over the next three years: data, data, AI.”

For Julio, this mission extends beyond business success to making a meaningful impact: “If I can support one human being to have a better life, or a million human beings to have a better life, that’s my passion in life.”

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