FanBasis, a platform helping digital entrepreneurs scale their online businesses, has secured $20 million in Series A funding to expand its infrastructure for creators monetizing their expertise and influence. The company has experienced 1,800% year-over-year growth and is projected to process over a billion dollars in transaction volume in the next 12 months.

Founded in 2020 during the early pandemic and TikTok boom, FanBasis originally helped influencers monetize their audiences through virtual experiences before shifting to serve what CEO Yash Daftary calls “Internet entrepreneurs” – creators building full-fledged businesses around their personal brands.

“We are transforming the tools that power how digital entrepreneurs run their business and make more money,” explains Yash. “Unlike other platforms that are like, ‘Here’s where you can come to make your first dollars online,’ our focus is on providing tools that will help you generate more revenue.”

From Venture Capital to Building FanBasis

Yash entered entrepreneurial waters long before FanBasis. “I’ve been building businesses since I was 13,” he says. At 17, he achieved his first exit after scaling a startup called Rental to 16,000 users. “It was basically where Airbnb meets Craigslist, where you could build a business renting out anything that you owned.”

This early success led him into venture capital, where he spent several years investing in early-stage SaaS and fintech companies at Storm Ventures and MBX Capital. During his time at Storm Ventures, Yash sourced 25% of the deals they invested in that year, leading to a full-time role while he was still in school.

It was during the pandemic while working at MBX Capital that Yash noticed a key problem in the creator economy. “I had a handful of influencers that I knew that went viral, got 1.2 million followers. And what I realized is none of them were actually making any money,” Yash recalls. “They were making $2,000 to $5,000 a month while having a million people follow them.”

This gap was striking to Yash: creators with audiences equivalent to “20 different, completely sold-out NFL stadiums” were earning minimal income. “The main gap here was they weren’t monetizing their audience directly; they were monetizing their audience indirectly with typical influencer marketing deals,” he explains. His insight was simple but powerful: “If you can monetize even 1% of them, you’re making tens of thousands of dollars a month.”

This observation led Yash to launch FanBasis in 2020 as a celebrity fan experience platform, offering virtual meet-and-greets with celebrities like Dennis Rodman, cooking lessons with Master Chef winners, and social media interactions with influencers.

In 2021, a new pattern emerged: the highest-earning sellers weren’t just offering fan experiences – they had built businesses around their personal brands. “The top guys on our platform were selling like a course or a community or a one-on-one mentorship call,” Yash notes. “They might be selling ‘Teach you how to build your own real estate brokerage’ or ‘Learn how to become a high-ticket remote sales rep.'”

These weren’t just influencers but full-fledged businesses with structured operations. “Instead of just being a normal influencer where it’s just you and you have like a manager and a publicist, these guys have a COO, a CFO, a fulfillment team, appointment setters that are sitting in their DMs, a full sales team, and they build a real business around it,” explains Yash.

This insight prompted a strategic change, transforming FanBasis from a celebrity fan experience platform to an infrastructure for digital entrepreneurs. The results? “We went from having around an eight-figure-a-year run rate to immediately close to a nine-figure-a-year run rate within six months.”

How FanBasis Empowers Digital Entrepreneurs

FanBasis targets creators who have moved beyond simple content creation into full-scale digital entrepreneurship.

“Our focus is on providing you with tools that will help you generate more revenue and keep it simple and straightforward,” says Yash. FanBasis has built a suite of solutions that specifically tackle the pain points Yash encountered in his own entrepreneurial journey, such as “no-code chaos, failed payments, Stripe shutdowns, overpromised platforms, and underdelivered results.” 

FanBasis counters these issues with payment solutions, smart routing to reduce failed transactions, and seamless integrations across the digital entrepreneurship ecosystem.

“We give creators the best payment suite when it comes to payment processing, access to ‘Buy now, pay later’ tools, building an affiliate program, understanding what their leads do,” Yash explains.

This focus on solving real business challenges has fueled FanBasis’s growth without requiring major marketing investment. “Until about 90 days ago, we didn’t even spend a single dollar on marketing,” Yash reveals. “It was all completely organic. We had thousands of people just signing up on our website, mainly through referrals.”

The Funding: Why Now and What’s Next

Despite being cash-flow positive for 18 months, Yash decided to raise $20 million in Series A funding to accelerate FanBasis’s growth.

“If we didn’t raise, we would have still been fine. We would have probably still 2-3x where we were at,” Yash explains. “The reason that we did raise, though, is we had the opportunity to almost 10x the business since that point in time.”

FanBasis signed its term sheet in November 2024 but only recently announced the round. Left Lane Capital, which recently raised a $1.6 billion fund, led the investment. “They actually found us. So props to them for having good deal sourcing,” Yash says. “They semi-convinced us to raise the Series A.”

The round attracted notable investors including soccer star Gerard Piqué, who Yash remembers as a character he “used to use when I was playing FIFA growing up,” and YouTube sensation KSI through Upside Ventures. Strategic investors who were already FanBasis users also participated, showing confidence in the platform’s value.

With this capital, FanBasis is pursuing growth on multiple fronts. “We’re investing it into ROI-positive activities with the intention of having a J-curve effect,” Yash explains. “We might go and dip into the red for two, three, four months, but by the end of the year, we’ll be heavily in the green again.”

A major portion of the funding is directed toward team expansion across engineering, sales, and product development. “We’re hiring top talent. We’re bringing them from companies that have done and achieved, and built products that we would be proud of ourselves,” Yash says.

This larger team has enabled FanBasis to compress what was originally a two-year product roadmap into just six months. The company is developing new tools beyond its core payment infrastructure, including enhanced customer analytics and flexible payment options.

Geographic expansion is another priority, with FanBasis targeting markets in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Canada. This builds on the company’s existing international presence – about 30% of its seller base already comes from outside the U.S., having joined organically without targeted marketing.

Perhaps most notably, FanBasis has begun strategic acquisitions. “We recently bought a company as well,” Yash reveals, though specific details remain under wraps.

Creator Economy Insights

As Yash observes, traditional influencer marketing has declined in effectiveness, particularly as content consumption moved toward short-form video with limited attention spans.

“Things moved to short-form content, quick attention spans. So it’s much harder to actually form real engagement from sellers when it doesn’t spark interest within the first three seconds,” Yash says, adding that audiences have also become more aware of identifying paid promotions, further diminishing their effectiveness.

“Customers at this point know when something’s being promoted as a paid promo compared to being promoted as something that’s organic,” Yash notes. “And the rules changed as well. Where to be fully compliant, when you do an influencer marketing post, you have to write hashtag ad in the caption. So that obviously gives it away as well.”

Yash believes that these changes have pushed creators toward building businesses around their personal brands rather than relying on sponsorship deals. “People naturally started progressing towards building businesses around their personal brand because that’s something that they can control. That’s something that they’re getting 100% of the revenue from,” he explains.

FanBasis Vision

Looking ahead, Yash has a clear vision for FanBasis’s future: “Right now, we build the Shopify for digital products and services. Our goal is to be that Amazon for digital products and services.”

This plan involves creating an ecosystem where digital entrepreneurs can not only host and sell their products but also access tools to improve their operations and drive revenue growth. The $20 million funding provides the resources for this vision, enabling FanBasis to invest in product development, market expansion, and talent acquisition simultaneously.

The company’s growth has created meaningful moments of validation for Yash. At a recent Fourth of July party, sellers flew in from other countries to celebrate with the FanBasis team. “It was really cool to see a lot of sellers that we’ve been working with for maybe two years at this point that we haven’t met in person,” Yash shares. “They came and really gave us a lot of props on where we’ve been able to take the platform.”

For Yash, these moments of connection with customers reinforced the impact FanBasis is having. The party brought together “one of the most accomplished rooms in the world with some of the largest influencers and sellers on our platform,” providing perspective on how far the company has come. “Sometimes you don’t really take a step back and see how far they’ve been able to come. So it’s nice to see from a third party perspective that other people kind of pointed that out for us.”

As FanBasis deploys its new capital and continues to expand its platform, Yash promises “some really exciting news coming,” hinting at further improvements and potentially the details of their recent acquisition.

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