“Most companies in this space haven’t invested in building the underlying technology that can deliver a really great product experience. So we did,”  states Avery Schrader, CEO of Modash, a platform that helps brands and marketers find, analyze, and track influencers across social media platforms. 

This fundamental difference in approach has positioned the Estonia-based startup as a transformative force in creator partnerships technology, recently securing a $12 million Series A funding round led by henQ VC.

When Avery established Modash in 2020, he had firsthand experience with the limitations of existing creator partnership tools. “I was freelancing at Bolt, and I saw that the tools were still really catering to sort of only PR teams,” he explains. “Like sending T-shirts to Kim Kardashian, your brand will be rich and famous. And I just saw that Bolt had a much more pragmatic point of view but couldn’t get access to the data that they really needed and wanted.”

This insight led Avery and his co-founder Hendry Sadrak to identify a crucial opportunity: brands needed better data infrastructure to make informed decisions about creator partnerships, not just flashy marketing promises. And that’s exactly what Modash focuses on.

Building From the Ground Up

The creator partnership industry has long struggled with unreliable solutions and superficial metrics. 

“A lot of brands feel like in one way or another they’ve been tricked or they’ve had a lot of frustration with those tools,” Avery notes, adding that this widespread frustration created an opportunity for a more customer-centric approach.

Modash’s response has been to build infrastructure from the ground up. “We cover the whole workflow end to end in Modash now, from where you can find people, recruit them, pay them, and collect content automatically. The whole workflow is inside of Modash,” Avery explains how their integrated approach eliminates the need for brands to juggle multiple platforms or rely on inconsistent third-party data.

The Power of Proprietary Infrastructure

At the core of Modash is its unified creator identity system tracking 250 million creators, maintained without requiring them to create or update individual profiles. 

“We’re one of the few platforms with a truly unified creator identity,” Avery explains. “It’s not only Kim Kardashian on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. There’s one identity, this human being called ‘Kim,’ and she has all of this presence across the web.”

This grants companies more accurate pricing insights across platforms, enabling smarter budget allocation for their campaigns. Brands also benefit from up-to-date performance metrics that reflect real-time creator impact, along with streamlined workflow management from initial contact through to payment.

“You get pricing competitive advantage because now you know that person has an audience on another channel and you could access that audience maybe without paying more,” Avery notes. “People will come to us for data accuracy. Generally, the data inside Modash is more robust and more up-to-date. You can see every partnership a creator has ever done inside Modash.”

Modash doesn’t sell services, and it’s technology-first strategy has proven compelling for major brands who are increasingly eager to own their relationships with creators (rather than outsourcing them to an agency). Nearly 2,000 consumer companies worldwide, including Birkenstock, Dbrand, Victoria’s Secret, and Farfetch, use Modash’s services to grow their partnerships function.

From Search Engine to Complete Platform

Throughout the past year, Modash has significantly expanded its capabilities beyond basic creator discovery. 

“Now you can pay creators. So companies like Farfetch and Ground News, who everyone has heard of, pay their creators through Modash. You can send them gifts… you can set up your entire affiliate program inside Modash,” Avery details how such features transform Modash from a simple search tool into a versatile platform for managing creator relationships.

The platform’s sophisticated analytics address fundamental industry challenges that, as Avery notes, competitors haven’t solved. 

“A really common problem, a very acute problem that people have, is the data inside of most platforms doesn’t really work because it’s built around averages,” Avery explains. “You need more granular data. For example, you want to pick a creator with a certain amount of views. If you pick an average, a whole bunch of the metrics will be broken because the last post was super viral. And so we do a very good job of handling these kinds of social edge cases.”

Innovation Through Strong Foundations

Modash’s model enables both current capabilities and future innovations in creator partnerships. “If you don’t have the necessary talent or infrastructure because you’ve been focused on selling agency services or something like that, you can’t take advantage of new technologies because you’re not prepared to,” Avery emphasizes.

This technical foundation supports ambitious new features, including advanced natural language search capabilities that will transform how brands discover potential partners. 

“Soon, in Modash, you’ll be able to search for creators, but then you’ll be able to add what you want them to look like and what breed of dog they have, or whether they’ve ever eaten a grilled cheese sandwich in their content or if they have freckles or red hair.”

Strategic Growth and Market Focus

Modash has found success through focused market targeting in the e-commerce sector. “We’re hyper-focused on the Shopify ecosystem right now. Our customers are Shopify brands,” Avery explains, revealing that this targeted approach has driven efficient growth, with the company reaching “several millions of dollars in revenue” before major funding rounds.

The recent acquisition of Promoty complements Modash’s technical strengths with enhanced relationship management capabilities. “They approach the space from a relationship management standpoint to build a pipeline to help users easily understand the state of all of their partnerships. On the other side, we aim to help you find the people that you’ll partner with and get data from them.”

This merger allows brands to identify influencers within their customer base and replicate successful partnerships, optimizing future campaigns.

The Future of Creator Partnerships

Avery anticipates significant market consolidation in the creator partnerships industry. “I think in another 18 months, there’ll be three major players, and then everybody else will be very verticalized into different categories,” he predicts. “You’ll have CreatorIQ for the Fortune 100, you’ll have Modash for all e-commerce, and then you’ll probably have vertical players  building specifically for restaurants, hotels, those niches.”Avery has faith in Modash’s investment in robust infrastructure, which positions it well for this future. For brands and agencies working with creators, the company’s approach demonstrates that sustainable success requires strong technical foundations rather than quick solutions. 

As Avery puts it: “Everyone will say that the creator economy is dead and influencer marketing is dead, and then all the smart people will keep spending more money there.”