Phyllo, a company that provides data infrastructure for the creator economy, has raised INR 120 Cr ($15.1 million) in a Series A fundraising round that was headed by RTP Global and included Nexus Venture Partners, Better Capital, and iSeed.
Ankur Nagpal of Teachable, Pat Shah of Audible, Sima Gandhi, a former head of business development and strategy at Plaid, and Nakul Gupta of Coinbase also invested as angel investors in the investment round.
Phyllo intends to strengthen sales and marketing efforts, develop new products, and expand the company with the additional funds.
Phyllo has now raised a total of $17.75 million with the most recent round. It received $2.5 million in venture money from Nexus Venture Partners and additional investors in 2021.
Akhil Bhiwal, Achintya Gupta, and Mohit Kumar founded Phyllo in May 2021, which serves as a data gateway platform for the creative economy. It enables creator economy businesses to gather information on creators or influencers, such as name, number of followers, and type of content, through a single application programming interface (API).
In the upcoming years, Phyllo plans to increase its coverage (access to data from social media sites). At the moment, it covers more than 20 sites, including Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, and others.
In India, Phyllo provides its services to the finance websites Jelly and Graphy from Unacademy. Beacon, Karot, and Kofluence are just a few of the companies it serves around the world.
On its platform, it claims to link more than 100,000 creator accounts. According to the startup, Phyllo is growing 75% monthly and 5X quarterly, with an additional 90X growth planned over the following two years.
Phyllo Bhiwal, Co-founder of Phyllo, said, “It’s a difficult task for creators to access data from different platforms. If a creator has to manage finances, they have to count the revenue generated on Youtube, Shopify, Substack and other platforms.
He added, “We realized that creators can’t automate all the information on one platform, so we thought about creating a framework similar to the account aggregator platform.”
Achintya Gupta, Co-founder of Phyllo, said, “There are more than 100 million creators worldwide whose professional identity, work, income and other related details are locked inside creator economy platforms. They need to share that information to get better service.”
Phyllo basically assists creators in securely sharing their data while giving them control over what information is shared. By providing them with a single API to collect creator data rather than requiring them to integrate with several platforms, it also helps enterprises centred on the creator economy.
The digital economy in India, which is predicted to be worth $800 billion by 2030, is also crucial to sustaining the creative economy.
Emphasizing the importance of the digital economy, Bhiwal said, “The country’s digital infrastructure is mature and thus has the potential to build an export-oriented creator economy. Within a few years, people will be creating digital assets in the form of NFTs and other associated assets and exporting extensively around the world.
To make this possible, Phyllo is building an API for brands focused on the creator economy. Businesses have to pay to access them for the number of APIs they use.”
When a brand signs up to subscribe to creator data, Phyllo charges a fee. Gupta described the startup’s business model: “The brand pays a set amount to obtain that creator’s data across all the channels they subscribe to.
