Pearpop, the marketplace for social collaborations between the teeming hordes of musicians, craftspeople, chefs, clowns, diarists, dancers, artists, actors, acrobats, aspiring celebrities, and actual celebrities, has raised $16 million in funding that includes what seems like half of Hollywood, along with Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six venture firm and Bessemer Venture Partners. The budget was split between a $6 million seed funding round co-led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and Slow Ventures, with atelier Ventures and Chapter One Ventures, and a $10 million additional investment led by Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six with the involvement from Bessemer.
TechCrunch first covered pear pop last year, and there’s no denying that the startup is on to something. It takes Cameo’s celebrity marketplace for personal shout-outs and makes it public. Social media personalities can boost followers by paying more popular characters to shout out, duet, or comment on their posts. “I’ve invested in pear pop because it’s been on my mind for a while that the creator economy has resulted in many inequitable outcomes for creators. Where I talked about the missing middle class of the creator economy,” said Li Jin, the founder of Atelier Ventures and author of a critical piece on creator economics, “The creator economy needs a middle class“.
“When I saw Pear Pop, I felt there was a huge potential for Pear Pop to be one of the creators of the creative middle class. They’ve introduced this mechanism by which larger creators can help smaller creators, and everyone has something valuable to offer to everyone else in the ecosystem.” Jin discovered pear pop through the TechCrunch piece, she said. “You wrote that article, and then I reached out to the team,” said Jin. The idea was so appealing it brought in a slew of musicians, athletes, actors, and entertainers, including Abel Makkonen (The Weeknd), Amy Schumer, The Chainsmokers, Diddy, Gary Vaynerchuk, Griffin Johnson, Josh Richards, Kevin Durant (Thirty 5 Ventures), Kevin Hart (HartBeat Ventures), Mark Cuban, Marshmello, Moe Shalizi, Michael Gruen (Animal Capital), MrBeast (Night Media Ventures), Rich Miner (Android co-founder) and Snoop Dogg.
“Pearpop has the potential to benefit all social media platforms by delivering new users and engagement while simultaneously leveling the playing field of opportunity for creators,” said Alexis Ohanian, Founder of Seven Seven Six, in a statement. “The company has created a revolutionary new marketplace model to reimagine how we think of social media monetization completely. As a social media founder and an investor, I’m excited for what’s to come with Rear Pop.” Heidi Klum, Loren Gray, Snoop Dogg, and Tony Hawk have already gotten paid to appear in social media posts by aspiring auteurs on the social media platform TikTok. Using the platform is relatively simple. A social media user (for now, that means just TikTok) sends a post on their social feed and requests that another social media user interacts with it in some way — either commenting, posting a video in response, or adding a sound. If the request seems okay or “on brand”, the person who accepts the request performs the prescribed action.
