Spotter, a startup that supports creators and provides AI tools, has raised $7.4 million, according to a Form D filing seen by TechCrunch. A Spotter representative confirmed the legitimacy of the filing but declined to provide further details.
This additional funding is significantly smaller than Spotter’s most recent round, a $200 million Series D led by SoftBank in 2022. Spotter, which was valued at $1.7 billion at the time, raised the money to support YouTubers’ businesses. Spotter provides upfront capital to strong YouTubers like MrBeast and The Try Guys to grow their channels, but in return, they must license some of their content to Spotter for several years. Spotter doesn’t acquire any copyright or intellectual property rights from creators; the company recoups its investment by collecting advertising revenue from the content it licenses.
Spotter has invested $940 million in over 735 YouTube channels, according to its website. This business model has been popular among creator startups. Other companies, such as Jellysmack and Creative Juice, have also made similar investments in creators.
As players in a new and misunderstood industry, creators often have difficulty securing funding from traditional financial institutions, even when they have profitable and healthy businesses. That’s where startups step in to fill this gap. Karat, for example, provides creators with financial resources such as corporate credit cards. In some cases, venture capitalists have also invested in creators, providing them with the capital they need to grow their businesses.
For Spotter, that means the company has a leg up. While the company can provide creators with millions of dollars in capital (which they can reasonably expect to recoup), creators themselves don’t have many other options for securing that kind of funding. Still, creators who work with Spotter seem to see positive results. The company told TechCrunch in 2022 that MrBeast used the up-front cash to fund a Spanish-language channel, where his viral videos were dubbed to reach a Spanish-speaking audience. At the time, Spotter said that in the years since he’d worked with MrBeast, his viewership had grown by more than 300%, to 1.35 billion monthly views across all of his channels.
“Creators have done second and third deals with us, so it’s not a one-time thing,” Spotter founder and CEO Aaron DeBevoise told TechCrunch. “Six months later, they do[another deal]because they’ve seen the success of reinvesting in themselves.”
Spotter declined to say where the money will go, but the additional funding comes around the same time as the launch of Spotter Studio, a suite of AI-powered tools for creators.
