Startup Stir Launches ‘Pay’ Product To Help Creators Collect On Brand Deals, Pay Collaborators

The startup Stir, a platform enabling influencers to manage their revenue streams, analytics, and share funds with collaborators, has unveiled a new product offering to help creators more efficiently collect payments on brand deals, as well as to send payments to their collaborators.

The product, aptly called Pay, lets creators make and receive instantaneous bank-to-bank payments without fees. Pay seeks to replace PayPal, which takes a 2.9% cut of transactions, says Stir’s co-founder and CEO, Joseph Albanese, as well as Venmo and Cash App, which tend not to be used in professional settings by brands. Pay also automates 1099s for both senders and receivers.

Creators can sign up for Pay on Stir’s website beginning today, and the company says it will host Zoom onboarding sessions to walk creators through the new offering. In addition to Pay, Stir previously unveiled two key products — Splits and Collectives — which help digital collaborators share revenues and analytics for team projects, respectively.

All of the Stir products are still in beta and available on an invite basis. Pay is free for creators, Albanese says, though the company does not disclose pricing for its Splits product, which allows, for instance, collaborators to share dedicated percentages of YouTube AdSense revenues or podcast CPMs. (Pay, on the other hand, is intended for one-off payment situations). Stir is being used by top creators including Rhett & Link

“We started with creators paying their collaborators. We care a lot about collaboration and the areas in which we can improve it,” Albanese says. “The brand deal space is very large with lots of options. We plan on leaning into it very soon but want to build with creators to make sure it’s truly something unique for them.”

To this end, in addition to its flagship products, Stir has released myriad Drops — or one-off launches aimed at filling quirky niches within the creator space, including Collab Party, Save Airrack, and MerchWith.

Albanese notes that additional Drops could be forthcoming in the payments realm, including public payment profiles, the ability to schedule payments or send payments via platform DMs, and batch sends. “We like to build with our customers, out in the open,” he said. “We’ll be sharing early designs and prototypes with customers over the coming weeks.”

At the same time that it has unveiled Pay, Stir — which raised a $4 million seed round in October and is now reportedly valued at $100 million following a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz — has unveiled a new logo and rebranded website, which you can check out right here.