Later’s recent acquisition of Mavely combines the latter’s creator commerce platform with the former’s leading brand marketing solutions, marking the first major consolidation in the creator economy for 2025. 

The deal merges Later’s brand discovery and campaign deployment capabilities with Mavely’s network of over 1,400 retailers and robust creator tools, creating an end-to-end platform for the industry.

“I almost think of Later and Mavely as two sides of the same coin,” explains Evan Wray, Mavely’s co-founder & CEO. “Now collectively coming together under one umbrella, it’s a full-service solution to eventually service millions of creators with a best-in-class creator experience.”

Mavely’s Path to Scale

This vision of serving millions of creators builds on Mavely’s notable trajectory. As Evan shares, the company achieved a GMV run rate of $1.4 billion and expanded its team by over 100% last year, growing across all departments to support its creator-first mission. 

“We hired a lot of our creator teams – we call them our influencer development specialists and then our creator account managers to help be a resource there for creators,” Evan explains. “We hired up on our marketing team to roll out things like Mavely meetups across the country and really more educational efforts for our creators.”

This strategic expansion reflected Mavely’s commitment to creator success. “We get feedback all the time from our creators,” Evan shares. “We have a creator advisory council, an area in the app where they can nominate brands. Our account managers are every single day talking to hundreds if not thousands of creators about ‘Hey, I wish that we had this feature’ or ‘I wish you had this brand.'”

Strategic Alignment

This intense focus on creator experience, while driving impressive growth, also revealed opportunities for expansion. “We were just myopically focused on the creator side of this whole ecosystem,” Evan notes. “Although we work with over 1,400 brands, and have a huge campaign business, we hadn’t really invested in the software tools for brands.”

The partnership with Later addressed this gap perfectly. “Later has built best-in-class software for brands and marketers to discover, find, talk to, recruit influencers, and ultimately schedule and deploy dollars,” Evan explains. “But they didn’t have the ultimate captive supply and captive creator audience.”

Technology Innovation and Integration

The companies’ complementary strengths extended to their technological approaches. “What’s happened in the space is you’ll get a typical agency that’s interacting with creators, which is a great model, but if they don’t build tech behind it’s hard to scale,” Evan observes. “Half of our team is product and engineering-oriented. That’s what allows our creator experience to scale from just 10 creators or 100 creators participating in a campaign to tens of thousands of creators selling things at any given time.”

This technology-first mindset led to innovative solutions like LinkDM and Button integrations. “When an influencer on Mavely posts something with our LinkDM integration, the links sent to their followers in their DMs are all commissionable links,” Evan explains. “Button is really building the future of app-to-app tracking. We literally see that when we’ve enabled Button across the retailers we work with, influencers can see up to twice as many earnings from the same volume of content, links, and clicks.”

Data-Driven Value Creation

These technological capabilities have generated substantial data assets, making the merger particularly powerful. 

“We historically have had $1.4 billion in GMV. We’ve got hundreds of millions of post-to-purchase journeys that we’ve been able to see and understand and help inform our creators,” Evan reveals. “Later’s historic business has a similarly scaled data set, but it’s different – it’s around impressions, creator content, all these different things that exist for more top-of-funnel creators. That’s a unique data asset for the entire industry that I think will make us a force to be reckoned with.”

Integration Progress and Future Vision

The initial integration phase shows promising results in combining the strengths of both platforms. 

“What we have an opportunity to do here is take the best from Mavely and the best from Later and combine it into this new, cool, amazing thing,” Evan shares. “We’re very purposeful about never losing the voice of the creator, always having them front and center in terms of how we can build the best creator experience, but then doing it at a larger and larger scale.”

The vision extends far beyond current capabilities. “The entire digital landscape and digital economy is shifting to be more creator-centric,” Evan notes. “The eyeballs have already gone there with the consumers, the brand dollars are now starting to come there, and then the technology solutions are starting to come there.”

Democratizing Creator Success

The new creator economy powerhouse aims to make creator success accessible to everyone. “In a perfect world, anyone who wants to be can become a creator and be given opportunities that match their likes, interests, niche, community, regardless of size, scale, look, feel, whatever it is,” Evan emphasizes. “And those opportunities can allow them to make whatever level of income they want from that – be it a side hustle, extra money for coffee, a full-time job replacement or even a huge business someone wants to build.”

The impact potential is what’s driving the combined company’s ambitions – “for Mavely and Later together to fundamentally change millions of creators’ lives for the better. I think that’s powerful and a good way to spend time,” Evan shares. “If we can nail that, all the other stuff will follow. We’ll build a great business and be super profitable. The revenue will be growing. Everything else will flow off of that.”