Quick take:
- Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher has invested in the social media collaboration marketplace Pearpop.
- The platform has recently pivoted to web3 with Pearproof, a platform that lets celebrities mint NFTs of their social media posts.
- Pearpop raised $18 million in the latest round at a valuation of $300 million.
Ashton Kutcher has invested in Pearpop. The celebrity-focused social media startup has raised $18 million in the second tranche of a Series A round. The company is now valued at $300 million after previously raising $16 million in the first tranche.
The latest fundraising also attracted backing from Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, with Blockchange Ventures, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund and C2 Ventures also participating.
Pearpop allows creators and brands to market their products by collaborating with celebrities like Madonna and influencers like Sommer Ray. These celebrities and influencers use their social media platforms like TikTok to promote the brands they collaborate with, with Pearpop proving insights and a compensation mechanism.
They also promote the brands and products by running challenges that invite people to post using specific prompts or sounds (on TikTok and Instagram) for a chance to receive cash rewards.
Pearpop’s innovative marketplace has attracted some of the world’s leading brands including Amazon, Netflix, Chipotle, Rakuten, Universal Pictures, Sonos and Beyond Meat, while Doja Cat, The Weeknd, Madonna, Shawn Mendez and Post Malone are some of the celebrities using the platform.
In an email comment sent to TechCrunch, Pearpop CEO and founder Cole Mason said the platform now has more than 200,000 creators.
“We’ve paid out over $10 million to creators, and we’ve been proud to see how Pearpop has opened up an opportunity for creators without a massive following: 71% of earnings have gone to creators with under one million followers,” said Mason.
The company plans to use the new tranche of funding to expand its team and launch two new products called Ovation and Passport.
Passport is a blockchain-based solution designed to enhance creator insights, giving them access to data related to audience engagement across multiple platforms. According to Mason, Passport illustrates Peapop’s commitment to data as a useful resource for the creator economy.
This is not Pearpop’s first foray into web3. The company is working on a blockchain-based product, Pearproof, which allows celebrities to mint NFTs from their social media posts. The Viral NFT platform allows NFTs to gain in value based on the popularity of the underlying social media posts.
****
Sign up to the world’s biggest crypto exchange Binance to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
Stay up to date:
