Up until the pandemic the global creator economy was just beginning to evolve, heavily centered on popular platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Spotify, and others. However, with COVID lockdowns, some continuing to this day, content creators took on a whole different form, becoming available to the millions, if not billions of people looking for a creative outlet. Everyone everywhere could take part in the creators’ economy, all they needed was the right platform to expose their talents to the world.

Whether through apps and gaming or podcasts and videos, Israeli startups have roared onto the creator scene, providing new channels for developing, producing, launching, and monetizing the content of your choice. Further enriching the creators’ economy and allowing more and more people to generate revenue from their creativity.

Lightricks

Lightricks’ suite of mobile apps for image and video editing have over 500 million downloads worldwide and have won numerous prestigious awards — including Apple's App of the Year, the Apple Design Award, and both Apple and Google Play’s Best of the Year. Every month, over 425 million images and videos are created and shared by individuals, influencers, and brands using a Lightricks-powered app. Lightricks’ popular suite of creativity apps currently includes editing tools for social media such as Facetune2, Facetune Video, and Filtertune, general creativity photo and video editing tools such as Videoleap, Motionleap, Photoleap, Artleap, Lightleap, and Beatleap, and the Boosted app which is Lightricks’ social media toolkit for small businesses.

Lightricks, a Jerusalem based startup, is the first Israeli unicorn in the creator's economy field. Lightricks was founded in 2013 by five Ph.D. students: Zeev Farbman, Nir Pochter, Yaron Inger, Amit Goldstein, and a former Supreme Court of Israel clerk, Itai Tsiddon. Headquartered in Jerusalem, the company currently has over 450 employees. Lightricks’ total funding to date is $335 million, with backers including Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Insight Partners, Greycroft, ClalTech and Viola Ventures.

LetsTok

Israeli startup LetsTok operates in the growing field of creators' economy, enabling content creators from around the world to generate stable revenue streams and strengthen relationships with their most valuable asset - their followers. The platform, launched in late 2020, leverages AI technologies to allow influencers and opinion leaders to connect with their fans in a Marketplace format for personalized suggestions, counseling, and guidance.

The company was founded by serial entrepreneurs Udi Yadin and Amir Geva, who have previously founded and managed technology companies, including stor.ai. LetsTok has raised, to date, $1.5M in pre-seed funding, in order to launch its platform in both US and Hong Kong markets.

Riverside.fm

Riverside.fm is a platform that makes it easy for creators, podcasters, and media companies to record remote interviews in studio quality. Riverside allows two people (or more) to record a podcast, including high-quality video, remotely. It also provides convenient online editing and advertising tools, eliminating the need for studio editing systems.

Launched over one year ago, Riverside.fm is currently being used by more than a few popular content creators, including Disney, Fox Sports, Marvel, TechCrunch, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The company was founded by two brothers, Gideon and Nadav Keyson and has raised $12 million to date, from a few pretty notable investors, including Reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian’s VC firm --Seven Seven Six; sports-tech vlogger, Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD; and content creator Casey Neistat.

Nas Academy

Nas Academy is a platform for creators to monetize their knowledge, giving them the tools to create their own classes and academies that fans can attend online. The platform is founded and led by Nuseir Yassin, a video blogger and influencer whose Nas Daily social media accounts boast tens of millions of followers across platforms.

The platform helps creators build on-demand class portfolios or live courses, while the marketplace allows users to navigate and shop around for courses that appeal to them. To date, the company has raised $11M from top tier VC's including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tech Aviv Founders Club.

Wisio

Wisio a plug-and-play solution that allows creators to create personal meaningful connections with their followers at scale, and turn their demand for attention into income, by providing creators a variety of ways to sync and create back-and-forth, meaningful relationships with their followers, while taking care of all the rest (customer support, feature development, payments, emails etc.) Wisio enables creators to establish genuinely meaningful relationships with their followers by turning them into paid coaches, advisers, sounding boards and conversation partners, and perhaps even friends.

Wisio was founded in 2019 by Adam Frank (CEO) and Idan Maor (CPO). After raising an undisclosed Pre-Seed, the company launched Wisio's first version. The results were outstanding - thousands of creators and tens of thousands of followers signed up to the platform. Tens of thousands  of 1 on 1 connections were established. This success is helping spearhead Wisio’s charge for Seed funding.

Artlist.io

Israeli startup Artlist.io has licensed over 20 million digital assets over the past half-decade, offering content creators music, sound effects, and stock videos which are all updated daily. Obtaining music and video licensing can often turn into a long-drawn-out process full  for content creators, who would need to acquire separate licensing for every clip or song they use. Artlist offers its users a one-time subscription that enables them limitless access to its massive content library.

Artlist was founded in 2016 by co-CEO and moviemaker, Ira Belsky; co-CEO and former Mellanox User Experience Engineer Itzik Elbaz; Music Department Director and Producer Eyal Raz; and Assaf Ayalon. Back in June of 2020, at the height of the pandemic freight, Artlist scored $48 million in a funding round led by KKR, and later in December acquired American content asset startup Motion Array for $65 million.