For years almost no serious capital would touch a creator. The audiences were real, the revenue was real, but the businesses underneath them looked too fragile, too tied to one person, and too far outside the spreadsheets that investors knew how to read. Today, a dedicated $64 million fund exists for the express purpose of backing creators as founders, investment firms are buying majority stakes in YouTube channels and operating them like media companies, and an SEC-approved platform is turning individual channels into securities that anyone can buy and trade.
The money has arrived. What the practitioners building these vehicles will tell you, though, is something the headlines miss: capital did not simply discover the creator economy. It is still learning how to price it, structure it, and own it. The deals are getting done, but slowly, and against a market that needs an enormous amount of education on both sides. The story of capital in 2026 is not a gold rush. It is the unglamorous, consequential work of turning a culture into an asset class.
This composite report draws on Net Influencer interviews conducted over the past year, in some cases for earlier reporting. All quotes are drawn directly from our recorded interviews.
It’s Not Funding. It’s Underwriting a New Asset Class.
Ask the people helping to deploy capital what has actually changed, and very few of them describe it as a hotter market. They describe a shift in what a creator business even is.
“We’re going from a world where there was a lot of vibes and a lot of hype to more of an extreme focus on looking at these businesses truly as companies that are generating revenue, they’re generating profit, they’re solving real problems for their customers, and working against the KPIs that capital allocators are looking for,” says Chris Erwin, founder of Rockwater, the M&A and strategy advisory firm that brokers many of these deals. Erwin calls 2026 the “sophomore year” of the creator economy, the year after the hype when the fundamentals have to show up.
That reframe is what makes a creator fundable in the first place. Megan Lightcap, who runs the $64 million Slow Creator Fund at Slow Ventures, came to the category from traditional consumer investing and found the logic was the same. “The more we talked about the strategy, it became increasingly clear that it was more similar to consumer underwriting and investing than it was talent identification,” she says. The job is not spotting a star. It is underwriting a business.
Maya Bakhai, founder of Spice Capital, puts the principle even more plainly. “If these are businesses, you should be able to invest in them,” she says. That sentence sounds obvious. The entire infrastructure being built in 2026 exists because, until recently, it was not true.
The Models: How Capital Actually Enters
There is no single way capital flows into a creator today. Across the firms doing this at scale, a handful of distinct structures have emerged, and most investors pick a lane.
The first is backing the creator as a founder. Slow’s insight was that the value does not sit where most investors were looking. “The investors that were investing in the creator economy were doing one of two things. They were either investing in the startups within the creator world, the infrastructure and tech, or they were investing directly in the brands,” Lightcap says. “The brand equity actually doesn’t sit on the balance sheet of Feastables or of Chamberlain Coffee.” So Slow invests in the creator’s holding company instead. “The value is actually being accrued to the creators. And so if you’re going to make money as an investor, you want to be in business with the creator.”
The second is buy-and-operate roll-ups, which is the closest thing the creator economy has to private equity. Ian Shepherd, co-founder of Electrify Video Partners, came out of Universal Music and built Electrify on the record-label analogy. “We invest into content creators, we buy majority stakes in their business, and we’re business partners with them where we have an aligned vision and strategy to increase the revenue of the business, increase the profitability, and accelerate the growth of these brands,” he says. In three and a half years, Electrify has made ten investments across astronomy, aviation, coding, history, and podcast channels.
Lucas Kollmann, co-founder of LunarX, brought the same thesis from the other direction, having run a content consolidation strategy at KKR. “During my time at KKR we were already driving a content consolidation strategy. We acquired many of the big traditional film studios, especially in Germany and France, to aggregate them and put them together in a bigger media unit,” he says. “That theme of consolidation was something I was working on for a long time.” LunarX applies that playbook to creators, taking equity rather than charging fees. “We’re not coming in as a service provider manager. We’re coming in here as a co-owner and equity partner, and we treat you like a co-founder.”
The third is financing the catalog. Spotter sits, in Christian Liquigan’s words, “at this unique intersection between capital, data, and media.” The model gives creators money against the value of what they have already built. “We’re really helping creators scale into true media businesses, so we’re giving them upfront capital so they can invest in higher quality and more consistent production and programming,” says Liquigan, who leads brand partnerships at the firm. He frames the broader shift in one line: the market is “moving from renting attention for a moment to investing in attention over time.”
The fourth, and the most radical, is turning the channel itself into a security. More on that below.
The Roll-Up Thesis: Owning the Channel
The roll-up players are betting that a YouTube channel, properly run, is a durable cash-flowing asset rather than a personality. The reference point everyone cites is the one that proved it. “Moonbug acquired large kids channels and then got sold for $3 billion to Blackstone,” Kollmann says. “That was maybe the most successful creator economy exit ever done.”
What makes a channel ownable, in this model, is precisely what makes it survive the departure of its founder. Shepherd is blunt that the work is de-risking the person. “A core part of our investment is always to diversify and de-risk the key person risk within the business,” he says. He describes one creator who “was spending 80 hours a week producing the content in the business on his own, and now he spends 80 hours a month on the business.” Kollmann draws the same line about what does not fit. “What doesn’t fit us is content that resolves all around the creator, because in the end it’s not something that you can repeat and institutionalize.”
Both men are also careful to insist they are operators, not financiers, which is itself a tell about how the category wants to be seen. “Electrify invests into creators, but we’re not an investment fund, we’re not finance bros,” Shepherd says. “I don’t consider us to be an investor, but rather an owner and operator of a media company.” And the structure is usually a partnership, not a buyout. “Rather than sell 100% and move on, why not retain a significant minority stake in the business?” Shepherd says. “Our first investment, we acquired 50% of the business. The creator’s 50% was worth more now than the 100% was worth then.”
Turning the Channel Into a Tradable Asset
The most ambitious bet in the market is that a YouTube channel should be investable the way a public company is. That is what Gigastar is building, and its co-founders frame the gap in stark terms. “It’s one of the fastest growing sectors in the US, yet there’s no financial infrastructure for it. There’s no way for investors to come and participate in this growth,” says Hazem Dawani, who leads the financial side of the company. Gigastar’s answer is “the first financial regulated platform to invest in the creator economy,” with a broker-dealer secondary market it says the SEC approved in April.
The pitch to creators is a reframe of what a channel is. “It positions them as an investable asset,” Dawani says. “Their YouTube channel now is an investable asset that can be traded on a market just like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.” It also, crucially, lets the market set a price. “We’re allowing the YouTube creators to set and secure a valuation for their YouTube channel,” he says.
Andy Faberlle, VP of Partnerships at Gigastar, spends much of his time on the education that the model requires, because most creators have never thought in these terms. “The average creator is not going to understand the difference between debt and equity,” he says. “If you want short-term funding for a project, you go to any of these other companies.” The distinction he keeps drawing is between borrowing against next year and selling a piece of forever. Dawani’s vision for where it goes is openly audacious: “I want to see BlackRock in their retirement plans including shares in YouTube channels. I want to see ETF-like products, groups of YouTube channels grouped together.”
The Hardest Part Is Still the Price
For all the new structures, the single biggest obstacle in 2026 is not access to capital. It is agreeing on what a creator business is worth.
Erwin, who sits in the middle of these negotiations, thought the gap would have closed by now. “We thought going into this year that the bid-ask spread between buyer and seller expectations was going to really close in a meaningful way. There’s still a gap there,” he says. The reason is education as much as economics. “A lot of buyers have a lot of questions about how do you value these businesses, what are the right questions to ask to understand growth, to understand synergy, to understand the risks, and what are the right structures for a deal that rewards founders for what they’ve built but also incentivizes the business to continue growing.”
Benjamin Grubbs, founder of Creator Capital and a former YouTube executive, has watched buyers be repeatedly surprised on the upside when they finally see the numbers. “When I heard some of those numbers, I thought, hold on a second, this channel that has just north of a million subscribers is generating how much revenue and how much profit?” he says. He also notes there is no settled playbook for who writes the check. “There’s a lot of different types of investors active within the space. You have individuals and angel investors, executives who work in the industry, venture funds at different stages, and then the larger private equity.” The structure, he says, “varies by company and who you’re dealing with.”
That immaturity is the opportunity, but it is also the friction. Erwin’s summary of his own job doubles as a summary of the year: “There’s a lot of energy and excitement in the space, but actually getting to the finish line requires a lot of education, good advisory, and good shepherding.”
The Convergence Nobody Can Ignore
The clearest signal that capital takes this seriously is who is showing up. Traditional media and institutional money are no longer watching from the sidelines.
Jeff Frommer, founder of OWM, builds infrastructure for what he calls the convergence of creators and capital, and he believes ownership is the unlock. “Creators will be both the capital and co-founders of these attention-first businesses,” he says. His company is trying to standardize equity-for-influence deals the way the Y Combinator SAFE standardized early-stage startup investing. “What the Y Combinator SAFE did for investment in early-stage startups, it standardized the ability for angel investors to take a bet,” he says. “I think the reason most creators don’t have access to equity today is because there’s a huge lack of standardization across the industry.” His larger claim is a bet on the decade: “Equity and ownership will be the next great economic driver of this country.”
Even the venture investors who once treated this as a niche now fold it into their core thesis. “I think of it as more just folded into consumer investing now,” says Amy Wu Martin of Menlo Ventures, who is candid about the discipline the asset class still demands. “In order to invest as a VC you really need to see a path to a multi-billion-dollar exit. That is a special and specific type of company.” Her firm bets on the picks and shovels rather than the creators themselves. “We typically invest at the software and platform layer,” she says, pointing to the rise of “programmatic influencer marketing” as a category that could grow the market “a hundredfold.”
Bakhai sees the same direction of travel from her seat funding the infrastructure. “Now it seems every big company knows, okay, I have to invest in a creator strategy. It’s replacing many marketing dollars that used to go to paid ads,” she says. “When there’s more money in the market, of course there’s a lot more noise and BS, but there’s also a lot of innovation, because people feel like they can take risks because there’s money for it.”
What Good Looks Like
The most sophisticated capital in the creator economy shares a few instincts. It treats creators as companies to be underwritten, not personalities to be sponsored. It is honest that the founder is both the asset and the risk, and it structures the deal to survive that tension. It picks a clear lane, whether that is backing the holding company, buying and operating the channel, financing the catalog, or making the channel itself tradable. And it accepts that closing the gap between what a creator thinks the business is worth and what a buyer will pay is slow, manual, education-heavy work that no spreadsheet shortcuts.
The throughline, as Lightcap puts it, is a change in what the entire market believes is possible. For years, she says, “there was this misconception that creators are not investable founders.” The work of 2026 is proving the opposite, one deal at a time, and building the rails so the next one is easier. Frommer’s framing is the one to end on, because it is the wager underneath all of it: ownership, not attention, is where the value finally settles. “You only own what you believe in,” he says. The capital betting on creators in 2026 is, at last, willing to own it.
Nii A. Ahene is the founder and managing director of Net Influencer, a website dedicated to offering insights into the influencer marketing industry. Together with its newsletter, Influencer Weekly, Net Influencer provides news, commentary, and analysis of the events shaping the creator and influencer marketing space. Through interviews with startups, influencers, brands, and platforms, Nii and his team explore how influencer marketing is being effectively used to benefit businesses and personal brands alike.
For years almost no serious capital would touch a creator. The audiences were real, the revenue was real, but the businesses underneath them looked too fragile, too tied to one person, and too far outside the spreadsheets that investors knew how to read. Today, a dedicated $64 million fund exists for the express purpose of backing creators as founders, investment firms are buying majority stakes in YouTube channels and operating them like media companies, and an SEC-approved platform is turning individual channels into securities that anyone can buy and trade.
The money has arrived. What the practitioners building these vehicles will tell you, though, is something the headlines miss: capital did not simply discover the creator economy. It is still learning how to price it, structure it, and own it. The deals are getting done, but slowly, and against a market that needs an enormous amount of education on both sides. The story of capital in 2026 is not a gold rush. It is the unglamorous, consequential work of turning a culture into an asset class.
This composite report draws on Net Influencer interviews conducted over the past year, in some cases for earlier reporting. All quotes are drawn directly from our recorded interviews.
It’s Not Funding. It’s Underwriting a New Asset Class.
Ask the people helping to deploy capital what has actually changed, and very few of them describe it as a hotter market. They describe a shift in what a creator business even is.
“We’re going from a world where there was a lot of vibes and a lot of hype to more of an extreme focus on looking at these businesses truly as companies that are generating revenue, they’re generating profit, they’re solving real problems for their customers, and working against the KPIs that capital allocators are looking for,” says Chris Erwin, founder of Rockwater, the M&A and strategy advisory firm that brokers many of these deals. Erwin calls 2026 the “sophomore year” of the creator economy, the year after the hype when the fundamentals have to show up.
That reframe is what makes a creator fundable in the first place. Megan Lightcap, who runs the $64 million Slow Creator Fund at Slow Ventures, came to the category from traditional consumer investing and found the logic was the same. “The more we talked about the strategy, it became increasingly clear that it was more similar to consumer underwriting and investing than it was talent identification,” she says. The job is not spotting a star. It is underwriting a business.
Maya Bakhai, founder of Spice Capital, puts the principle even more plainly. “If these are businesses, you should be able to invest in them,” she says. That sentence sounds obvious. The entire infrastructure being built in 2026 exists because, until recently, it was not true.
The Models: How Capital Actually Enters
There is no single way capital flows into a creator today. Across the firms doing this at scale, a handful of distinct structures have emerged, and most investors pick a lane.
The first is backing the creator as a founder. Slow’s insight was that the value does not sit where most investors were looking. “The investors that were investing in the creator economy were doing one of two things. They were either investing in the startups within the creator world, the infrastructure and tech, or they were investing directly in the brands,” Lightcap says. “The brand equity actually doesn’t sit on the balance sheet of Feastables or of Chamberlain Coffee.” So Slow invests in the creator’s holding company instead. “The value is actually being accrued to the creators. And so if you’re going to make money as an investor, you want to be in business with the creator.”
The second is buy-and-operate roll-ups, which is the closest thing the creator economy has to private equity. Ian Shepherd, co-founder of Electrify Video Partners, came out of Universal Music and built Electrify on the record-label analogy. “We invest into content creators, we buy majority stakes in their business, and we’re business partners with them where we have an aligned vision and strategy to increase the revenue of the business, increase the profitability, and accelerate the growth of these brands,” he says. In three and a half years, Electrify has made ten investments across astronomy, aviation, coding, history, and podcast channels.
Lucas Kollmann, co-founder of LunarX, brought the same thesis from the other direction, having run a content consolidation strategy at KKR. “During my time at KKR we were already driving a content consolidation strategy. We acquired many of the big traditional film studios, especially in Germany and France, to aggregate them and put them together in a bigger media unit,” he says. “That theme of consolidation was something I was working on for a long time.” LunarX applies that playbook to creators, taking equity rather than charging fees. “We’re not coming in as a service provider manager. We’re coming in here as a co-owner and equity partner, and we treat you like a co-founder.”
The third is financing the catalog. Spotter sits, in Christian Liquigan’s words, “at this unique intersection between capital, data, and media.” The model gives creators money against the value of what they have already built. “We’re really helping creators scale into true media businesses, so we’re giving them upfront capital so they can invest in higher quality and more consistent production and programming,” says Liquigan, who leads brand partnerships at the firm. He frames the broader shift in one line: the market is “moving from renting attention for a moment to investing in attention over time.”
The fourth, and the most radical, is turning the channel itself into a security. More on that below.
The Roll-Up Thesis: Owning the Channel
The roll-up players are betting that a YouTube channel, properly run, is a durable cash-flowing asset rather than a personality. The reference point everyone cites is the one that proved it. “Moonbug acquired large kids channels and then got sold for $3 billion to Blackstone,” Kollmann says. “That was maybe the most successful creator economy exit ever done.”
What makes a channel ownable, in this model, is precisely what makes it survive the departure of its founder. Shepherd is blunt that the work is de-risking the person. “A core part of our investment is always to diversify and de-risk the key person risk within the business,” he says. He describes one creator who “was spending 80 hours a week producing the content in the business on his own, and now he spends 80 hours a month on the business.” Kollmann draws the same line about what does not fit. “What doesn’t fit us is content that resolves all around the creator, because in the end it’s not something that you can repeat and institutionalize.”
Both men are also careful to insist they are operators, not financiers, which is itself a tell about how the category wants to be seen. “Electrify invests into creators, but we’re not an investment fund, we’re not finance bros,” Shepherd says. “I don’t consider us to be an investor, but rather an owner and operator of a media company.” And the structure is usually a partnership, not a buyout. “Rather than sell 100% and move on, why not retain a significant minority stake in the business?” Shepherd says. “Our first investment, we acquired 50% of the business. The creator’s 50% was worth more now than the 100% was worth then.”
Turning the Channel Into a Tradable Asset
The most ambitious bet in the market is that a YouTube channel should be investable the way a public company is. That is what Gigastar is building, and its co-founders frame the gap in stark terms. “It’s one of the fastest growing sectors in the US, yet there’s no financial infrastructure for it. There’s no way for investors to come and participate in this growth,” says Hazem Dawani, who leads the financial side of the company. Gigastar’s answer is “the first financial regulated platform to invest in the creator economy,” with a broker-dealer secondary market it says the SEC approved in April.
The pitch to creators is a reframe of what a channel is. “It positions them as an investable asset,” Dawani says. “Their YouTube channel now is an investable asset that can be traded on a market just like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.” It also, crucially, lets the market set a price. “We’re allowing the YouTube creators to set and secure a valuation for their YouTube channel,” he says.
Andy Faberlle, VP of Partnerships at Gigastar, spends much of his time on the education that the model requires, because most creators have never thought in these terms. “The average creator is not going to understand the difference between debt and equity,” he says. “If you want short-term funding for a project, you go to any of these other companies.” The distinction he keeps drawing is between borrowing against next year and selling a piece of forever. Dawani’s vision for where it goes is openly audacious: “I want to see BlackRock in their retirement plans including shares in YouTube channels. I want to see ETF-like products, groups of YouTube channels grouped together.”
The Hardest Part Is Still the Price
For all the new structures, the single biggest obstacle in 2026 is not access to capital. It is agreeing on what a creator business is worth.
Erwin, who sits in the middle of these negotiations, thought the gap would have closed by now. “We thought going into this year that the bid-ask spread between buyer and seller expectations was going to really close in a meaningful way. There’s still a gap there,” he says. The reason is education as much as economics. “A lot of buyers have a lot of questions about how do you value these businesses, what are the right questions to ask to understand growth, to understand synergy, to understand the risks, and what are the right structures for a deal that rewards founders for what they’ve built but also incentivizes the business to continue growing.”
Benjamin Grubbs, founder of Creator Capital and a former YouTube executive, has watched buyers be repeatedly surprised on the upside when they finally see the numbers. “When I heard some of those numbers, I thought, hold on a second, this channel that has just north of a million subscribers is generating how much revenue and how much profit?” he says. He also notes there is no settled playbook for who writes the check. “There’s a lot of different types of investors active within the space. You have individuals and angel investors, executives who work in the industry, venture funds at different stages, and then the larger private equity.” The structure, he says, “varies by company and who you’re dealing with.”
That immaturity is the opportunity, but it is also the friction. Erwin’s summary of his own job doubles as a summary of the year: “There’s a lot of energy and excitement in the space, but actually getting to the finish line requires a lot of education, good advisory, and good shepherding.”
The Convergence Nobody Can Ignore
The clearest signal that capital takes this seriously is who is showing up. Traditional media and institutional money are no longer watching from the sidelines.
Jeff Frommer, founder of OWM, builds infrastructure for what he calls the convergence of creators and capital, and he believes ownership is the unlock. “Creators will be both the capital and co-founders of these attention-first businesses,” he says. His company is trying to standardize equity-for-influence deals the way the Y Combinator SAFE standardized early-stage startup investing. “What the Y Combinator SAFE did for investment in early-stage startups, it standardized the ability for angel investors to take a bet,” he says. “I think the reason most creators don’t have access to equity today is because there’s a huge lack of standardization across the industry.” His larger claim is a bet on the decade: “Equity and ownership will be the next great economic driver of this country.”
Even the venture investors who once treated this as a niche now fold it into their core thesis. “I think of it as more just folded into consumer investing now,” says Amy Wu Martin of Menlo Ventures, who is candid about the discipline the asset class still demands. “In order to invest as a VC you really need to see a path to a multi-billion-dollar exit. That is a special and specific type of company.” Her firm bets on the picks and shovels rather than the creators themselves. “We typically invest at the software and platform layer,” she says, pointing to the rise of “programmatic influencer marketing” as a category that could grow the market “a hundredfold.”
Bakhai sees the same direction of travel from her seat funding the infrastructure. “Now it seems every big company knows, okay, I have to invest in a creator strategy. It’s replacing many marketing dollars that used to go to paid ads,” she says. “When there’s more money in the market, of course there’s a lot more noise and BS, but there’s also a lot of innovation, because people feel like they can take risks because there’s money for it.”
What Good Looks Like
The most sophisticated capital in the creator economy shares a few instincts. It treats creators as companies to be underwritten, not personalities to be sponsored. It is honest that the founder is both the asset and the risk, and it structures the deal to survive that tension. It picks a clear lane, whether that is backing the holding company, buying and operating the channel, financing the catalog, or making the channel itself tradable. And it accepts that closing the gap between what a creator thinks the business is worth and what a buyer will pay is slow, manual, education-heavy work that no spreadsheet shortcuts.
The throughline, as Lightcap puts it, is a change in what the entire market believes is possible. For years, she says, “there was this misconception that creators are not investable founders.” The work of 2026 is proving the opposite, one deal at a time, and building the rails so the next one is easier. Frommer’s framing is the one to end on, because it is the wager underneath all of it: ownership, not attention, is where the value finally settles. “You only own what you believe in,” he says. The capital betting on creators in 2026 is, at last, willing to own it.
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