Astronauts constructing giant jigsaw puzzle in outer space. Concept illustration depicting "APIs".

Image Credit: Svetabelaya via Getty

The creator economy is on the rise, thanks to hundreds of millions of talented individuals and a wide range of platforms (YouTube, Substack, etc.) supporting and monetizing their work.

Most of these solutions host a massive volume of creator data (including audience and engagement stats), but all of it remains siloed and inaccessible to the bigger community of developers working on new platforms/tools to further develop the creator ecosystem. There are hardly any open APIs that create a pipeline to access and transport the information. Plus, when dealing with these APIs, developers have to give significant time and effort in order to read documentation, create sandboxes and maintain the integration.

Phyllo’s data gateway

To solve this challenge, San Francisco-based Phyllo provides developers with a single API pipe that acts as a secure on-demand gateway to trustworthy creator data from hundreds of platforms including YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Spotify and TikTok. The company today raised $15 million in a series A round of funding.

The API infrastructure, as Phyllo explains, connects to every creator platform and maintains a live data feed to its systems to manage the data. Then, it provides a normalized data set to help businesses and developers make use of the creator data in a way that is simple yet impactful

How Phyllo works

Enterprises can leverage Phyllo APIs to verify any creator’s identity, income and engagement data. This can power use cases such as financial services for creators, tools to build creator websites, social identity verification for web3, creator portfolios and smart campaign ROI measurements for influencer marketing. Brands can also use the data to quickly identify new and upcoming creators.

However, it must be noted that the API kicks in only when the creator agrees to connect their data from other creator platforms.

Growth in creator economy space

The company debuted earlier this year and has already seen adoption from over two dozen companies in the creator economy space, including Beacons, Creative Juice, Creator.co, Karat, MagicLinks and Bintango. More than 50 companies joined the waitlist for its early access.

“These developers range across influencer and affiliate marketers (Creator.co), creator financing platforms (Karat, Pixel Card), NFT marketplaces (Coinbase NFT, Opensea), social tokens (Rally, Autonomy Network) and many more,” Akhil Bhiwal, co-founder and CEO of the company, told VentureBeat.

With this round, which was led by RTP Global, Phyllo plans to accelerate product development, expand its customer base and grow the list of platforms its developer-first API can connect to. 

“There are more than 800 creator platforms across 20+ creator categories, and we are building integrations with all of them,” Bhiwal noted. He also said that the company is hiring aggressively across functions and will continue to invest in that area.

“Phyllo is all set to address a 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,” Jishnu Bhattacharjee, MD at Nexus Venture Partners, which participated in the series A round, said.