Tallinn-based Modash raises €11 million to help consumer brands scale creator partnerships | EU-Startups

Modash, a creator partnerships platform that helps brands partner with content creators, has closed a €11 million Series A funding round. The round was led by henQ VC alongside returning investors from Modash’s pre-seed and seed rounds. The funds will be directed towards engineering and product improvements across the platform, including their global influencer payment solution and AI-enabled creator search. This round comes on the back of Modash’s success in partnering with the influencer marketing teams of top-tier brands like Birkenstock, Dbrand, Victoria’s Secret, and Farfetch.

The creator economy is currently worth $250 billion worldwide and on track to be a $480 billion industry by 2027—an enormous leap from its market valuation at $2 billion in 2016. Despite this, the available tools and services that connect brands with creators are often unnecessarily cumbersome, and fail to provide data detailed enough to actually drive partnership decisions. These platforms typically maintain comprehensive entries only on creators who regularly update their individual profiles, which makes for incomplete results at best. 

Modash takes a different approach. Its search engine, called Discovery, acts as a comprehensive overview of the creator economy. Marketing teams use it to search through 250 million content creators and influencers, no matter how niche, and view individual creators’ audience and content performance metrics. Brands aren’t required to onboard creators individually. Once a partnership begins, Modash provides features that manage outreach and communication, collect and store live influencer content, and measure creator performance and recommend similar creators. Their in-platform payments solution solves vendor management concerns like cross-border compliance, while ensuring creators get paid faster, easier and without surprise fees. 

Avery Schrader, Founder & CEO of Modash, said: “Modash has spent the last five years figuring out how to empower brands to scale their partnerships with creators. Nearly 2,000 consumer companies worldwide are growing their partnerships function using Modash. Those companies love us because we understand where the friction in the creator partnership process comes from, and our solutions just work. We’re excited to keep investing in new technologies that will permanently change how brands discover new partners, how deals are done and paid for, and how performance is measured. This round is also bringing us closer than ever to our North American customers, with a second office located just ten minutes away from Shopify HQ in Ottawa and a short flight from NYC, Boston, and major cities across the East Coast.”

Jan Andriessen, Partner at henQ, added: “Modash breaks the mold in terms of Series A investments. Its product is already market-leading globally, with a robust, data-backed search engine capable of mapping the global creator landscape and an end-to-end platform to unify the entire experience of doing creator partnerships, including a payment system. Its client base is already growing fast across all continents, and the creator economy shows no signs of slowing down. The founders were deeply involved in the creator economy for a long time, putting them ahead of the curve and allowing them to recognize its enormous potential. And so far with Modash, they’ve shown they have the energy, resilience and vision to realize that potential.”

Funds raised as part of this Series A will support multiple aspects of product development, especially the influencer payment solution and to further Modash’s AI-driven creator discovery. Additional funds will go towards building a customer-facing team in North America to better support users in those time zones. Goldman Sachs predicts that influencer-marketing spend in the U.S. alone will hit $5.89 billion this year, and with more than 500 customers in the U.S. already, it is an essential market for Modash.

More product developments are on the way, with a particular emphasis on serving B2C brands looking to make creator partnerships part of their brand DNA. Helping creators make a living and get paid for their work is as central to Modash’s mission as ever. Now, by providing the most comprehensive platform for managing social partnerships, helping consumer brands struggling to get their influencer marketing off the ground is too.