How CreatorFi’s $45 million raise lets creators borrow against future earnings

CreatorFi, a New York fintech that advances money against creators’ recurring platform income, closed $45 million in combined equity and debt financing, the company said in a Sept. 2 announcement covered by AlleyWatch, Coingape and other outlets. Equity investors were led by EV3, and the debt came from a group led by VerisFi Capital.

The money is meant to expand advances to independent operators in gaming, music, content creation and live experiences — people with real income from platforms like YouTube, Spotify and Roblox but little standing with traditional banks. CreatorFi lends against that income directly, then collects repayment automatically as the platforms pay out, without taking equity or copyrights.

A $45 Million Package With Room to Grow

The round combines a Series Seed equity raise with what AlleyWatch described as CreatorFi’s first institutional credit facility. Combined, the two pieces total $45 million, with capacity to scale to $100 million more, according to AlleyWatch and a separate account from Quasa. On the equity side, EV3 led the round, joined by Uncorrelated Ventures, Protagonist, Aptos Foundation, Pluto 11.11 and P2 Ventures, along with angel investors from State Street, JPMorgan Chase and Periscope, AlleyWatch reported.

On the debt side, VerisFi Capital came in as senior lender, with Intrinsic Capital and Kamui Finance providing mezzanine capital, per AlleyWatch. AlleyWatch’s own headline states the round as “$5M” — a figure that conflicts with the $45 million described throughout the article’s text. But the body of that same article and Quasa’s separate reporting describe only the combined $45 million figure, without confirming the exact split — a detail that remains unclear across sources.

How a Typical Advance Is Sized
A CreatorFi YouTube advance can be sized against six to 24 months of a creator’s future AdSense earnings, then repaid automatically as roughly 50% of each payout, according to Quasa and Newsy Today’s reporting on the round.

How the Advances Work

CreatorFi advances capital against what it calls verified, recurring IP-based revenue: YouTube AdSense payouts, Spotify and other streaming royalties, TikTok Shop sales, and Roblox or Fortnite in-game earnings, according to AlleyWatch. Checks typically run from $500,000 to $5 million, per AlleyWatch, Quasa and Newsy Today’s reporting on the round.

Terms described by Quasa and separately confirmed by Newsy Today include a revenue share of roughly 50% from the specified platforms until an advance is repaid, collected through letters of direction that route a set percentage of each platform payout directly to CreatorFi. A YouTube advance, for example, may be sized against six to 24 months of a creator’s future AdSense earnings. Collection amounts move with actual earnings rather than a fixed schedule, Quasa reported.

What Creators Give Up in Return

CreatorFi does not take equity or, in most cases, permanent catalog rights — a contrast Newsy Today drew with some competitors that acquire catalogs outright. Creators keep ownership of their intellectual property, and music businesses that borrow against catalog revenue keep their copyrights, according to Quasa and Newsy Today.

But the advances come with conditions. Newsy Today reported that some deals require creators to develop new intellectual property on specific production deadlines, and that CreatorFi may require life insurance policies for creators who represent significant “key-person” risk to a deal. Chief executive Billy Huang described the underwriting focus directly: “We try to figure out what is the strength of the IP,” he told Business Insider, according to Newsy Today, rather than relying solely on trailing revenue.

From a Blockchain Pilot to Institutional Debt

CreatorFi did not start as a venture-backed lender. It launched July 9, 2025, as a project of Insomnia Labs, an enterprise blockchain and loyalty-technology company that has built programs for Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Under Armour and the International Cricket Council, according to a GlobeNewswire release from that date. The original version offered stablecoin-based credit built on the Avalanche blockchain, backed by an initial $12 million credit facility from Kamui Finance and other real-world-asset investors including Intrinsic Capital.

The infrastructure behind that first version relied on the Coinbase Developer Platform to manage stablecoin liquidity and disbursements, CDP Wallets to keep auditable transaction trails, and Coinbase Offramp to convert stablecoins to local currency instantly, according to TechStartups’ coverage of the launch; Ava Labs supplied the underlying Avalanche infrastructure. Launch partners included Yoola, a YouTube multi-channel network with more than 1,200 creators, and Record, a royalty-infrastructure platform for music creators. Huang said at the time that “CreatorFi gives them the financing solutions they deserve,” per TechStartups. Two of CreatorFi’s original backers, Kamui Finance and Intrinsic Capital, are also named as mezzanine lenders in this month’s $45 million round, now alongside new senior lender VerisFi Capital.

CreatorFi lends against that income directly, then collects repayment automatically as the platforms pay out, without taking equity or copyrights.

Who the Financing Targets

CreatorFi’s current pitch covers four verticals — gaming, music, content creators and live experiences — and finances creators, game studios, record labels and talent managers, according to Coingape. Newsy Today named several borrowers in the company’s portfolio: music label Coasthill IV, game developer Mythical Games, and individual creators Lah Mike and The Danza Project. On gaming specifically, CreatorFi’s own website describes financing built around Roblox, Fortnite’s UEFN creator tools and Minecraft marketplace and server operators, offering user-acquisition funding, minimum-guarantee financing against licensing revenue, and multi-title growth capital for studios, all without taking an equity stake.

Newsy Today positioned CreatorFi against narrower rivals — Spotter, which lends against a single platform’s revenue, and catalog-focused firms such as Sound Royalties and beatBread. Huang pointed to falling production costs as one reason a wider set of creators now qualifies for this kind of underwriting: “It used to take hundreds of millions of dollars,” he told Business Insider, of building a media franchise. “Now, in Roblox, in Fortnite, kids are doing it in their basement.”

The Financing Gap and What It Signals

Reporting on the original 2025 launch, from Tech Funding News, described why creators have struggled to raise money through conventional channels: banks have been reluctant to treat digital rights as collateral, and industry incumbents such as record labels and royalty firms have sometimes demanded ownership stakes as high as 80% in exchange for upfront funding. Tech Funding News and TechStartups each cited a market projection — $1.49 trillion and $1.5 trillion by 2034, respectively — for the digital creator economy; the figures are close enough to reflect rounding of the same estimate, but neither outlet named the original research source.

Influencers Time, writing about the September round, pointed to broader signals it said were giving lenders confidence in creator income: YouTube payout reliability it put at 82%, influencer-marketing return-on-investment signals it put at 3.5 times spend, and a proliferation of guaranteed deal structures across creator networks. The outlet argued that a fintech treating creator income as collateral is “implicitly telling brands that creator payouts are now stable enough to model, forecast, and securitize.” CreatorFi has not disclosed its loss rates or the total value of advances currently outstanding, so it remains unclear how that confidence has translated into portfolio performance so far.

Photo: Coolcaesar · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons