Fintech co. Awake Corp. provides financial management tool to creators

South Korean fintech startup Awake Corporation won the hearts and wallets of judges at the D.Day X D.Camp event on Thursday, garnering 20 million won ($15,119) in prize money.

“We view each creator as an enterprise and their products as intellectual property,” the startup’s founder and CEO Kim Min-joon said during his pitch at the D.Day event.

Awake provides an integrated revenue management platform named Creator.ly, which creators can use as their consolidated contact information hub in place of e-mails or phone numbers. 

But the service doesn’t stop there. 

Creators are also able to view and directly sign contracts on the platform using electronic signatures.

When it comes to YouTube AdSense, Google’s program that facilitates payment to creators in the YouTube Partner Program, Creator.ly gathers data from social media platforms and sends an analytical report to each user every day at 10 p.m. Korea Time. 

Roughly 77% of a YouTuber’s income comes from advertisers and only 23% comes from AdSense, according to Awake’s independent research.

Perhaps due to the daily analytics, 12% of Creator.ly members use the service on a daily basis. 

The company, founded in April 2020, has exponential growth potential, CEO Kim said, thanks to the rapidly growing market worldwide.

There are 19,000 users of Creator.ly in Korea, and another 17,000 users in eight countries. 

An often overlooked pro for the budding startup is the founding members’ ability to connect with the creators who are mostly under the age of 40. The average age of those working for Awake is 26 years. 

MARKET POTENTIAL

There are some 100,000 YouTube creators in Korea who have monetized channels. To put the number into perspective, one out of every 500 Korean Youtubers is generating profit from the video-sharing platform. 

The number of creators is much bigger when taking those who are using other platforms into consideration, such as Twitch or Korea’s homegrown AfreecaTV. 

Globally, the YouTube creator market is growing 32% each year on average. 

The trading volume on the Creator.ly platform for this year is forecast to exceed 400 million won ($302 million), the startup claims. 

D.DAY BY D.CAMP

The largest monthly pitch day event to date for D.Camp was aimed at narrowing the gap between venture capital firms and startups.

D.Camp, operated by the Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs, hosted the event at its Front 1 accelerator hub in collaboration with 22 financial institutions. 

A total of 297 startups, including those headquartered outside of South Korea, applied to present their business models and products at the monthly event but only 10 select startups had the chance to do so.

In the first part of the event, five early stage startups took turns presenting their business models and answered questions from the judges while the second part consisted of five startups in the Series A round or even in the later stages of fundraising. 

There were other events alongside the main event such as the Global Meetup, hosted by Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Cento Ventures and more.

Write to Jee Abbey Lee at jal@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.