KOMI Group processes over 5 billion monthly social media views not for vanity metrics, but to extract actionable insights that drive content strategy across their ecosystem of publishing, licensing, and talent management businesses. While many creator economy companies rely on intuition and trends, this Manchester-based digital media company built a technology-powered method that transforms raw analytics into a strategic advantage.

Founded in 2016 by Andrew Trotman (CRO) and now co-led by CEO Sam Lenehan, KOMI has grown from an Excel-powered startup to a global operation. Its most recent funding from BGF, worth £5.5M, has enabled it to break into the top 20 largest digital portfolios worldwide. Unlike most social media entrepreneurs who built businesses around their personal interests, Andrew approached the space with an analytical mindset, which gave KOMI a distinct advantage from the beginning.

“If you look at competitors at the time, they had grown out of hobbies,” Andrew notes. “But actually, the gap that I could see was that I could be quite strategic and look at these as business opportunities.”

This business-first approach emerged from Andrew’s early experiences. “I started a horse racing subscription service, but I didn’t actually know much about horse racing. I was very much obsessed with the data bit behind that,” he recalls. This obsession with metrics rather than subject matter allowed him to identify patterns that hobbyists, blinded by their passion, often missed.

“If you’re doing something because it’s a business, you do it systematically and you do it based on objective data rather than subjective feeling, which gives you an edge over somebody that’s purely doing it because they love it,” explains Sam. “If you’re doing something because you love it, there’s a whole host of blind spots that you then get just because you’re doing it out of passion and enjoyment. However, if you’re doing something because you want to create a business opportunity, you open yourself up way more to feedback and criticism, which in the social game is where all the value is.”

From Excel to Enterprise

What began as manual analysis in Excel has grown into an advanced technology platform that serves as the cornerstone of KOMI’s operations across its three divisions:

• KOMI Publishing: A top 5 UK digital publisher, generating over 5 billion views per month across all social platforms. 
• ARK by KOMI: A video content licensing hub sourcing some of the most highly engaged content in the world. 
• KOMI Talent: A growth and management service, designed by creators, for creators.

This three-pillar structure allows KOMI to gather insights from multiple angles of the creator economy, creating feedback loops that strengthen each division. Their publishing arm provides direct data on content performance, the licensing division offers a window into trending content globally, and the talent management service leverages these insights to help individual creators grow.

This proprietary technology, KOMI Insights, not only counts views but also analyzes the complete viewer experience. “Each one of those views has all those metrics that sit behind it. We can crunch all of those numbers and actually be able to learn from it and then play around with it internally,” Andrew adds.

The metrics they track go far beyond standard industry measurements. “We post now between 40K and 50K pieces of content a year across the group,” Sam shares. “We track audience behaviors and audience trends in relation to our content. We look at how long they’re watching the content for. We look at the sentiment that they’re watching our content with.”

This detailed approach reveals insights that drive both creative decisions and business strategy. Conventional metrics, such as follower counts, often mislead creators and brands about the true value of engagement. “We’ve seen creators who have got 10,000 followers earning more than creators that are 200,000 followers,” Andrew reveals. “It’s not the metric that people obviously look for anymore.”

Creating a Data-Informed Organization, Not Just Tools

KOMI’s success isn’t built solely on technology but on a carefully cultivated organizational culture where data informs every decision without stifling creativity..

“One of the decisions early on was to hire a learning development coach, which meant that everybody in the business was able to access and work with a learning development coach,” Andrew explains. This happened when the company had just eight employees—a decision rooted in long-term thinking rather than immediate needs.

This commitment to building an enduring institution shapes how KOMI structures its operations. Sam describes their operating model as one that “actually borrows a lot of principles from Japanese manufacturing” and focuses on “where the value that the customer is actually interested in is being created.”

“In our world, it’s the person who makes the video that the audience is actually looking at,” Sam explains. “So our entire KOMI Insights platform is built to look at that set of activities that our audience is actually interested in and work out how to serve that video editor or producer or creator with the best systems, the best data, the best coaching, the best mentoring.”

This approach stands in contrast to traditional top-down creative organizations. “We never use views as an indicator of performance. Internally, a view is meaningless,” Sam emphasizes. “The strength in the data that comes out underpinning a culture that seeks to purely look at data as the foundation on which creative decisions are made, rather than creative ego or any individual’s aspirations, gives us a massive edge.”

Transforming Creator Management Through Data Intelligence

KOMI’s data-focused philosophy naturally extends to how they support creators through their talent management division. Unlike traditional agencies that often manage large rosters of talent with minimal individual attention, KOMI takes a different route.

“A lot of the work we do with creators is building a strategy, six-month strategies to weekly chats, all of those strategies, how they’re doing, applying all that data into the performance,” Andrew explains. By analyzing a creator’s account performance metrics, KOMI helps them build an engaged audience that attracts brand partnerships.

As Sam shares, this approach has yielded notable results for creators who partner with KOMI. “We’ve had creators increasing their audience size anywhere from 2.7 times to 36 times within 12 months of working with us,” he reveals.

The company has also addressed practical issues in the creator economy, such as payment delays. “One of the biggest problems is that people have to wait a minimum of 90 days to be paid for deals,” Andrew notes. KOMI’s solution is straightforward: “We’ve got one-week payment terms that will pay all of our creators within one week of when the work is done.”

Multi-Faceted Value Through Integrated Data

KOMI’s three business divisions—publishing, licensing, and talent management—didn’t emerge randomly but were strategically developed based on data insights and competitive advantages.

“We always saw diversity of revenue stream as a way to bring and build a sustainable organization,” Sam explains. “But the rule that we always had was we weren’t going to go into a new venture unless we felt we had an unfair advantage going into that space.”

For creators, this means access to data-backed growth strategies that traditional agencies can’t provide. For brands, it means forming partnerships with genuinely engaged audiences rather than relying on inflated follower counts. For audiences, it means content that reflects their actual preferences rather than creators’ assumptions.

“We can advise those creators and advise those influencers based on lived evidence and real data as opposed to just gut instinct and gut feel, which if you’re a talent business on its own, you don’t have,” Sam explains, highlighting the value of their integrated approach.

He points out that KOMI has achieved 20x growth in its audience over four years, with its content now reaching over 150 million people globally and accumulating over 5 billion views per month by June 2025.

Global Expansion and Future Outlook

Having established their data-focused model in the UK and secured follow-on funding from BGF last July, KOMI is now working on international growth, particularly in the U.S. market.

“What we have built and functionally what we can do for particularly creators globally, we can massively compete,” Andrew asserts. “The model there is genuinely quite unique in the market.”

Looking ahead, KOMI’s leadership expects changes in the creator economy as institutional investors recognize the value of data-backed content businesses. “I think you’re going to see a lot of institutional capital trying to get into the space via individual brands, channels, creators who have already got a presence,” Sam forecasts.

They also anticipate a shift in the influencer field. “I fully believe in this product. I use it myself, and I’m an advocate for it. It’s a continuation of micro-influencers with strong voices and clear brands that will become increasingly more popular,” Andrew predicts.