The TL;DR

We started Phyllo around a year ago and launched our early access program this year. Over the last few months, we’ve seen some amazing traction that proves product-market fit and a great set of customers who can’t imagine their lives without Phyllo anymore. 

We are excited to share that we just raised a $15 million Series A round that’ll help us continue forward on our mission to democratize data access in the creator economy and Web3. This milestone would not have been possible without all of our early customers who always believed in the product and continue to love it. A huge shout out to all of you and thank you :) 

The funding

Phyllo’s Series A was led by RTP Global with participation from Nexus Venture Partners, Better Capital, and iSeed. Phyllo is also backed by notable angel investors including Sima Gandhi who is ex-head of BD and strategy at Plaid, Pat Shah of Audible, Ankur Nagpal of Teachable, Nakul Gupta of Coinbase, among others.

We are excited to partner with our investors at RTP Global and Nexus Venture Partners who have backed many successful SaaS, devtools, and PLG businesses around the world. 

Nishit Garg, Partner at RTP Global said, “We’ve been closely following Phyllo for a few months now. It’s amazing to see the great traction they are getting. It also validates that there is a strong need for a Plaid-like solution in this market. 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 and RTP Global is proud to be a catalyst in this journey.” 

“We are witnessing the meteoric rise of the creator economy, but the creators and the companies catering to them are plagued by a lack of easy, secure, and verified access to organized creator data, that remain siloed in numerous platforms. Phyllo is all set to address that key pain point. 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.

The story behind Phyllo

Many of our teammates at Phyllo have been and still are creators. Back in 2019, I was a full-time creator too. I created music videos on Youtube, wrote on substack, invested in cryptos, consulted a few brands, and had a bunch of other side hustles. My work was spread across platforms, and I had multiple sources of income. 

I never thought that would be a problem. But when it was time to file my taxes, my accountant friend asked me for a bunch of financial documents. It took me a lot of effort to find my financial data across different income sources and platforms. 

It took months. Not only was this a major hassle, but it also affected my profession as a creator - I lost valuable time I could have been spending creating content. 

It was then that we realized a gaping hole in the industry. The creator economy lacked the basic infrastructure that provides data access and transparency - not just for financial services but also for better visibility, brand partnerships, distribution, etc. 

Developers deserve better data access tools and APIs

Talking to companies building tools and products for the creator economy and Web3, we noticed a common pain across the board - every developer and every product person needs reliable access to data that is trustworthy, reliable and scalable. Getting access to this data in a reliable way is very hard especially with creator and Web3 platforms.

And that brings us to Phyllo - the universal API for easy and secure access to creator-consented data across hundreds of source platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Discord, OpenSea, TikTok, Shopify, Substack, and others.

Our mission is to provide a developer-first API platform that enables hundreds of thousands of developers and companies to build for the creator economy. What Stripe did for payments, we want to do for the creator economy, the digital native economy, and Web3. 

Customers ❤️ Phyllo!

We launched our early access program this year and are already working with some of the leading companies in the creator economy space, including Beacons, Creative Juice, Creator.co, Karat, MagicLinks, Bintango, and Nerve, among others. 

Phyllo helped Beacons take away the major developer and infrastructure challenge and launch a successful media kit product to be used by millions of creators worldwide. With Phyllo, Beacons was able to:

• Add support for multiple source platforms without adding any infrastructure overhead
• Focus more on the product and customers rather than spending time on maintaining infrastructure
• Launch new features with faster time to market like the brand deal media kit and social cross-platform analytics (Examples: Suki, TheBeardedITGuy, Meg Flaim)
• Move forward in the mission to help creators monetize their content and audience

See how easy it is to onboard a creator to Beacons using Phyllo:

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How Phyllo Works

Developers building for the creator economy need access to trusted and verified data from creator platforms that can then be used to power core business use cases. The biggest challenge with accessing such data is that very few creator platforms provide open APIs to integrate. In a few cases where they do, a lot of developers’ time and effort goes into reading documentation, creating sandboxes, maintaining the integration, and adhering to data and security compliances, among other issues. Similar complexities exist in the Web3 world, where developers face challenges getting access to off-chain data from platforms with no APIs.

Phyllo takes away all of this pain by providing a single API pipe to integrate with hundreds of creator platforms.

Integrating Phyllo into your application is a breeze, requires only a few lines of code, and provides a great user experience. 

Powering the future of the creator economy, digital-native companies, and Web3

By 2024, over half of the American workforce will be self-employed - and this trend is global. Gen Z wants to be independent and is finding ways to monetize its skills - Substack for writers, Onlyfans for adult creators, NFTs for superfans, social tokens for communities, etc.

We believe that eventually, every business will be in the creator economy. Creators are the new SMBs, and they’ll continue to grow. 

Creators worldwide are gaining immense traction, but their audience and engagement are trapped on specific platforms. Additionally, they face numerous issues proving their clout across platforms and in Web3. Developers in the creator economy are building tools and products to help creators but are struggling to find a verified source of creator data that is easy to manage and maintain. 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.

Companies building tools, products, and services for the creator economy and Web3 can leverage Phyllo’s APIs to verify any creator’s identity, income, and engagement data. 

This opens up an opportunity to power numerous use cases like:

• Financial services for creators
• Creator tools like - link-in bio and social engagement trackers
• Social identity verification for Web3 and digital-native companies
• Portfolios of creators
• Influencer marketing ROI measurements and many more

We are just getting started!

Phyllo is built by a bunch of creators and we feel the pain. We are a team of builders who have used hundreds of dev tools. In the last six months, we’ve talked to hundreds of prospects and signed over 50 of them for trials. Since January of this year, more than 100,000 creators have used Phyllo to link their accounts. We are excited and our journey is just getting started. 

Join the Phyllo family

We are always on the lookout for amazing folks joining us in our mission to grow the creator economy, web3, and the digital native economy. We are a remote-first company and imbibe a culture that promotes innovation and growth. If you are excited about this, we’d love to talk to you. 

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