February 2026
In February, Olivia Moore at a16z published "Marketplaces in the Age of AI: Graveyard to Greenfield."
Her thesis was simple: AI doesn't create entirely new marketplace categories. It resurrects categories that previously failed because coordination was too expensive.
There are no bad ideas. Just ideas launched before the cost structure made sense.
Creator marketplaces are one of the clearest examples of this.
And they are a graveyard.
Over the last decade, dozens of platforms tried to connect brands with creators for influencer marketing, UGC, or performance content.
The model was consistent:
Many reached real scale. Some hit $10M+ revenue. A few reached $20–30M.
Very few broke through.
The failure pattern wasn't lack of demand. Brands clearly want creators. The creator economy is massive.
The failure was structural.
Matching brands with creators is not a commodity search problem.
It is market-specific, language-specific, tone-specific, and performance-dependent.
A brand launching in Germany needs German-speaking creators with the right cultural context, audience quality, and content style. That matching process is heterogeneous and expensive.
Most marketplaces solved it with human account managers.
That drove CAC up.
Most platforms monetized via per-campaign fees, percentage of creator payouts, or small SaaS subscriptions.
Revenue per brand was thin. Margins were constrained. Scaling required constant new volume.
The moment a brand found a creator that worked, they often moved off-platform.
Disintermediation killed retention.
This is exactly the dynamic Moore describes in failed marketplace categories: companies that grow meaningfully, but stall before becoming venture-scale businesses.
Not because the idea was wrong.
Because coordination was too expensive relative to revenue.
Creator marketplaces didn't fail because "influencer marketing was hype."
They failed because the cost of coordinating humans at scale exceeded the value captured per transaction.
The core bottleneck was operational.
Running creator campaigns across markets involves sourcing, screening, briefing, quality control, content iteration, performance tracking, payment, and ongoing management.
Each of those layers required human labor.
Margins compressed under headcount.
The model plateaued.
AI doesn't make creators unnecessary.
It changes the economics of coordination.
Moore outlines two mechanisms through which AI revives failed marketplace categories: AI as a middle layer replacing expensive manual coordination, and structural redesign — not just doing the old model faster.
Both are relevant here.
When a brand says: "We need 20 creators in Germany posting three times per week."
Historically, that required manual sourcing, manual screening, manual follow-ups, and manual campaign monitoring.
That coordination cost grows linearly with creator count.
With AI-driven systems: intake is automated, screening is standardized, communication flows are templated, performance signals are structured, underperformers are cut automatically, and winners are scaled programmatically.
The cost curve bends.
Human managers move from coordination to judgment.
That is a fundamental shift.
The second shift is revenue structure.
Traditional marketplaces facilitated one-off campaigns. The economics break.
A subscription-based creator operation model — where a brand runs ongoing, managed creator infrastructure — changes LTV dramatically.
But that subscription model only works if operational overhead is compressed.
AI makes that viable.
There is a deeper difference that matters more than AI.
Most creator marketplaces aggregate existing supply.
They depend on whoever signs up.
That creates structural fragility: no creators in a new market means you can't serve the client. Top creators leave and supply shrinks. Brands poach creators and the platform weakens.
We believe the winning model is supply creation, not supply aggregation.
Instead of "here are creators who signed up," the model becomes: "we recruit, train, and operate creators for you in any market you need."
That transforms the role of the company.
It is no longer a thin matching layer.
It becomes operational infrastructure.
And operational infrastructure is harder to disintermediate.
There is always a temptation in marketplace categories to stay "asset light." Payments layer. Matching UI. Light coordination.
But creator operations are inherently full-stack.
Brands do not want a list of profiles, a dashboard, or a payment tool.
They want volume, reliability, performance, and geographic expansion.
That requires coordination.
The moat becomes recruitment pipelines, training systems, operational tooling, performance data, and process iteration. Not UI. Not payment rails. Operational knowledge.
The creator marketplace graveyard is real.
But it was not a demand problem.
It was a coordination cost problem.
AI reduces coordination cost. Subscription models improve LTV. Supply creation reduces disintermediation.
Together, those factors alter the unit economics of the category.
The opportunity is not building "another influencer platform."
It is building infrastructure for distributed human coordination.
The companies that win here will not look like marketplaces.
They will look like orchestration systems.
We launched 8x a few months ago.
Within the first few weeks, we reached €250K ARR.
We've since crossed $500K ARR in under four months.
We are operating with 100+ active creators across 10+ countries.
The traction is not driven by a better UI. It is driven by operational leverage.
We are currently in San Francisco, raising a seed round to scale this infrastructure further.
The graveyard exists. But the cost structure has changed.
And when cost structures change, categories reopen.