The FinTech industry meets the creator economy
Karat Financial, a bank for the creator economy, has raised $26 million so they can make corporate cards that extend credit for creators. Why is this needed? Well, without a recurring income to show you can pay off your spend debt, banks are not too trusting of creators to clear off their IOUs. This is, ofcourse, despite some of them making more annually than most people in "traditional" jobs.
Without such a financial service, creators can not take credit to then leverage for other things (like buy a car or house). This means that they're effectively tied to spending whatever cash they have in the bank — and that's just plain pre-historic!
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Business financing is also an option
If you create content through a registered business, that is. You can either take out a business loan under your company, or seek other non-traditional forms of funding — like crowdfunding.
Take a cue from Augustus Media, a UAE-based media company that just raised USD 400,000 through peer-to-peer lending, facilitated by Beehive (a UAE-based SME lending platform). In raising this leverage, Augustus Media has dished out its financial performance, and for those of you interested: they've been profitable for the last 5 years (and that's more than most tech companies out there can say!). On top of that, they have one million monthly readers — the market opportunity is out there, people!
But if peer-to-peer is a bit too FinTech-y for you, you can always consider traditional roadshows to investors to raise a funding round. Most recently, Saudi-based stock content platform The Stock raised USD 667,000 in pre-seed funding from regional investors. Yes, that is more than what Augustus Media raised, but they had to give up equity in exchange.
Flying over to international waters, Cent (the creator network) also recently opted for the investor-led funding round. They just closed a USD 3m funding round.
