History
Founding
Cole Mason, an ex-YouTube creator and model signed to Ford Models, co-founded the company with talent manager and music industry luminary Guy Oseary in October 2020. After identifying that there was no platform that allowed creators to predictably secure paid brand collaboration deals, [3] Mason set out to build a platform designed to disrupt the talent booking business for the creator economy.
Overview
Pearpop is a technology platform that "pairs" brands to the right creators for social media campaigns, directly enabling brand-to-creator collaboration. The use of technology to match brands and creators has been likened to other high-growth marketplace businesses and led Forbes to compare Pearpop to Uber or Airbnb, calling it the "Uber or Airbnb of the creator economy." [4]
Pearpop's platform challenges and disrupts the standard model of influencer marketing which conventionally has relied on a very manual, costly agency model in order to exist. Pearpop brand campaigns typically pay creators on a pay-for-performance basis, allowing creators to be compensated more as their videos succeed in social media. The company works with large Fortune 500 brands including Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, and others, as well as musical artists like Shawn Mendes, Doja Cat, and Madonna.
The company has amassed the largest known community of vetted social media creators in the world, more than 200,000 as of 2023, with the mission to help creators "Earn a Living Doing What You Love." Collaborations with brands are one of the most consistent ways for creators to monetize their audience and make money, and Pearpop is a market leader in providing high quality brand deals to creators. Operating across TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, its community includes notable celebrities including Heidi Klum, Loren Gray, Snoop Dogg and Tony Hawk, among others. [5]
Recognition & Milestones
- Pearpop was named to 2022 Fast Company's Most Company's Innovative Companies List, [6] at #7 on the Social Media List
- Pearpop was named the "Airbnb of the Creator Economy" by Forbes [7]
- CEO Cole Mason was named to the prestigious Forbes 30 under 30 List [8] in November 2021
- In 2022, Pearpop appointed advertising & marketing executive Alex Morrison as Chief Marketing Officer [9]
- In June 2022, Pearpop launched the first ever TikTok Live scripted comedy series, [10] starring TikTok star Jericho Menke.
- In November 2022, Pearpop announced it had raised an additional $18M at a $300 million valuation [11]
- In July 2023, Pearpop introduced a new feature, "Boost Mode", that lets brands turn creator content into paid ads [12]
Guy Harley Oseary is an Israeli-American talent manager and writer. His clients include Madonna, Amy Schumer and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whom he has managed since 2021.
Kajabi LLC is a Newport Beach, CA-based SaaS technology company that develops a platform for creators and entrepreneurs to create, market and sell digital content. Recently Kajabi has expanded its focus to include support for online courses and app development. The company is a tech unicorn, with a $2 billion valuation.
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LANDR Audio is a cloud-based music creation platform developed by MixGenius, an artificial intelligence company based in Montreal, Quebec. Since launching with its flagship automated mastering service in 2014, LANDR has expanded its offerings to include distribution services, a music samples library, virtual studio technology (VSTs) and plug-ins, a service marketplace for musicians, and online video conferencing.
A-Grade Investments, LLC is a venture capital firm founded in 2010 by actor Ashton Kutcher, entertainment manager Guy Oseary, and billionaire investor Ron Burkle to invest in technology start-up companies. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
Sprinklr is an American software company that develops a software as a service (SaaS) customer experience management (CXM) platform. The company's software, also called Sprinklr, combines different applications for social media marketing, social advertising, content management, collaboration, employee advocacy, customer care, social media research, and social media monitoring.
PT Tokopedia is an Indonesian e-commerce company. Tokopedia is a subsidiary of a new holding company called GoTo, following a merger with Gojek on 17 May 2021. It is one of the most visited e-commerce platforms in Indonesia.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
TikTok, known in mainland China and Hong Kong as Douyin, is a short-form video-hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed both through a mobile app or through its website.
ShareChat is an Indian social networking service platform, owned by Bangalore-based Mohalla Tech. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, and incorporated on 8 January 2015. ShareChat app has over 350 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages. The current valuation of the company is $5 billion.
Charli Grace D'Amelio is an American social media personality and dancer. She was a competitive dancer for over a decade before starting her social media career in 2019, when she began posting dance videos on the video-sharing platform TikTok. She quickly amassed a large following and subsequently became the most-followed creator on the platform in March 2020 until she was surpassed by Khaby Lame in June 2022. With over 155 million followers, she is the second most-followed person on TikTok, as of 2025.
Huddles (originally Clash, Byte (via Acquisition), and later Huddles) was an American short-form video hosting service and creator monetization platform social network where users could create looping videos between 2–16 seconds long. It was created by a team led by Brendon McNerney and PJ Leimgruber who formerly worked together at NeoReach, Inc. Dom Hofmann was involved as the architect of much of the code, as the founder of Byte, a successor to Vine, which Hofmann co-founded, until the project was sold to Clash App, Inc., and subsequently renamed.
Triller is an American video-sharing social networking service that was first released for iOS and Android in 2015. The service allows users to create and share short-form videos, including videos set to, or automatically synchronized to, music using artificial intelligence technology. It initially operated as a video editing app before adding social networking features.
Jacob Pace is an Internet entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Pace, a digital transformation agency and venture studio.
The creator economy or also known as creator marketing and influencer economy, is a software-driven economy that is built around creators who produce and distribute content, products, or services directly to their audience, leveraging social media platforms and AI tools. These creators - who may include social media influencers, YouTubers, bloggers, artists, podcasters, and even independent professionals - generate revenue from their creations through a variety of monetization strategies, including advertising, sponsorships, product sales, crowdfunding, and subscription-based services. According to Goldman Sachs Research, the ongoing growth of the creator economy will likely benefit companies that possess a combination of factors, including a large global user base, access to substantial capital, robust AI-powered recommendation engines, versatile monetization tools, comprehensive data analytics, and integrated e-commerce options. Examples of creator economy software platforms include YouTube, TikTok, WFCN, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, Spotify, Substack, OnlyFans and Patreon.
YouTube Shorts, created in 2020, is the short-form section of the online video-sharing platform YouTube.
Atmosphere.TV or simply Atmosphere is a global over-the-top video on-demand service, headquartered in Austin, Texas, that provides audio-optional video content in a business-to-business capacity.
Gina L. DiVittorio is an American writer, comedian, and political commentator. She is best known for The Pocket Report, a satirical news web series focused on American politics and society that she writes, performs, and edits, and a viral video about the dating app Hinge.
Anthony Dawson, better known as TooTurntTony or "Duck Daddy", is an American social media personality, model, and wildlife conservation advocate. He is known for creating viral comedy skits, social experiments, and other videos often involving his family and domestic ducks.
Fanfix is a California-based social media technology platform that hosts membership clubs for content creators.
