Pearpop - The Social Collaboration Company

Company & Team Introduction

Pearpop is the world’s first self-service creator marketing platform. The company was founded by former fashion model turned-founder Cole Mason and renowned talent manager Guy Oseary in late 2020 with a vision to help broaden access to social collaboration. Cole currently serves as CEO of Pearpop, and before founding the company, he worked for the well-known modelling agency Ford Models and as a YouTube content creator, giving them an incredible network of high-end creators on their platform when paired with Oseary’s celebrity client base. Pearpop has a mission to “Help creators earn a living doing what they love”. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California and has scaled its team to ~49 employees.

Product Overview

Pearpop’s unique performance-based business model has created a novel, low-friction method for implementing influencer marketing. Brands and Celebrities can post challenges on Pearpop and set specific parameters for eligible creators, such as the creator’s niche, follower count, whether content must be approved before posting, and payout size. Once creators that meet the criteria choose to accept, they tag the company on social media and are compensated through the video's number of views. Pearpop also released another monetization feature in 2023, “Boost Mode”, which allows brands to search through viral content and utilize performant content for paid ads; if a creator's content is chosen, they receive a bonus.

Total Addressable Market

Pearpop is pursuing a massive market opportunity with a differentiated self-service model to connect brands and influencers. According to research from Grandview Research, the total addressable market for influencer marketing platforms was already over $13.78B in 2022, and experts are forecasting strong growth for the vertical through 2030, growing at a 26.8% CAGR, expanding Pearpop’s market opportunity to over $92B.

Business Model & The Numbers

Pearpop pays creators based on the number of views they receive on their videos and utilizes a simple percentage take rate business model. Creators receive 75% of the placement cost, leaving 25% for Pearpop. In a TechCrunch article, Founder/CEO Cole Mason also released, “We’ve paid out over 10 Million to Creators, and we’ve been proud to see how Pearpop has opened up an opportunity for many creators without a massive following: 71% of earnings going to creators with under one million subscribers.”

Traction

The company has seen impressive market pull from both the brand and creator side of its platform. The company works with a laundry list of the largest companies in the world, including Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Chipotle, TikTok, and Disney and has an impressive 90% client retention rate. On the creator side of their marketplace, they’ve reached a critical mass of over 218,000 creators. The company’s first-mover advantage and well-networked founders enabled strong early adoption from both sides of their platform, creating strong network effects for Pearpop. The company was also named the “Best Influencer Marketing Platform” in 2022 by DIGIDAY and made FAST COMPANY’s “Most Innovative Companies list for the Social Media vertical.

Competitors

Pearpop’s differentiated pay-per-click business model has set the company apart by aligning outcomes with a performance-based model compared to traditional influencer methods, where companies pay thousands of dollars a year for an influencer database, search for hours for influencers that align with your brand, reach out to them, then negotiate prices, etc. Even if you complete that cumbersome process, you pay per post, which misaligns the cost and performance of the content. Major players in the traditional influencer database space include GRIN, IZEA, and Creable. TikTok also has a creator marketplace where they pay out 20-40$ per million views, but brands typically search for the highest-end celebrities to work with and require content to be submitted and then chosen by the brand. Another advantage of Pearpop is they’ve created partnerships with every major social platform, allowing businesses to manage cross-platform influencer campaigns through one central platform.

Funding

According to funding data from Crunchbase, Pearpop has raised three rounds of funding. The company raised two funding rounds in April 2021, with both rounds being jam-packed with significant VCs and angels. The first round was a $6 million seed round spearheaded by Ashton Kutcher, Sound Ventures, and Slow Venture, with participation from additional as Mark Cuban, Night Ventures, Tyr Ventures, The Chainsmokers, and Rich Miner (Co-Founder, Android) among participants in the round. The second round was a $10 Million Series A led by Seven Seven Six, with Bessemer Venture Partners also taking part in the round. The company tapped the capital markets again in late 2022, raising an additional $18 Million extension to their Series A led by Sound Ventures and Seven Seven Six with additional participants including Peak State Ventures, Foresight Ventures, C2 Ventures, Blockchange Ventures, and Blizzard Fund. The company’s Series A extension valued the company at $300M post-money and has raised $34M across its three funding rounds.