Phyllo, a startup that is building tools for developers of creator economy applications, said on August 17 it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by RTP Global, signifying the growing investor interest in the burgeoning creator economy.
Investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Better Capital, and iSeed also participated in the round.
The startup, which raised $2.8 million in seed funding last year, is backed by angel investors such as Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal, Coinbase executive Nakul Gupta, former Plaid executive Sima Gandhi and Audible executive Pat Shah.
Phyllo said it plans to use the funds to accelerate product development, expand its customer base and grow its developer-first API platform.
Founded by Akhil Bhiwal, Achintya Gupta, and Mohit Kumar in 2021, Phyllo is building a set of application programme interfaces (APIs) that help businesses and developers get continuous access to verified creator data directly from hundreds of platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Patreon, Discord, and Spotify with the creator's permission.
Breaking silos
In a statement, Bhiwal said creators were gaining traction but their audience and engagement were boxed into specific platforms. They also faced issues proving their clout.
On the other hand, developers building tools and products to help creators struggle to find a verified source of creator data. This is because very few creator or digital-native platforms provide open APIs for integration into their apps. Even if they do, it further requires "an immense amount of developer time and effort", the company said.
"Our goal with Phyllo is to enable these developers and companies to focus on their core business, achieve data coverage over hundreds of creator platforms and go to market in the fastest way possible," Bhiwal said.
Phyllo launched its product in January 2022. Its suite includes an Identity API that verifies a creator's identity and profile data. The engagement API provides data about a creator's content and engagement metrics such as subscribers, followers, reach, impressions, and comments among others. Its income API gives information on a creator's income streams across different platforms along with transaction-level data.
Web3 opportunities
The company said it was seeing new opportunities and markets being created with the rise of Web3. Enabling access to the creator's social media identity, reputation and engagement data can "power interesting use cases" for Web3-based creator platforms such as creator verification, profile showcases and dynamic token pricing among others.
"Think about what Stripe and Plaid did for payments and banking respectively, we believe that Phyllo will do the same for the creator and digital native economy," said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners.
Phyllo claims to have more than 20 customers including link-in bio platform Beacons, creator-focused banking app Creative Juice, influencer marketing platform Creator.co, financial service provider Karat, the social commerce platform MagicLinks, and Bintango which provides productivity and monetisation tools for creators, among others.
Nishit Garg, Partner at RTP Global, said "the creator economy and Web3 is only just starting to grow and companies like Phyllo will play a significant role in the growth of this market".
