They Were Tokenizing YouTube Videos. Now They Move Millions a Day

Talentir is six people and two founders. By the time it raised this round, it was already profitable, the new product was live, and the team did not actually want to raise. They set out to collect €3M as a top-up, mostly from people who already backed them. Word got out, the commitments climbed past 5.5 million Swiss francs, and they did the thing almost no early-stage founder does on purpose: they turned money away and closed at €4M. To understand why a profitable six-person company turns down capital, you have to go back to the product they walked away from.

Lukas Steiner and Johannes Kares are best friends who lived together in Vienna and were each other’s best man. Their backgrounds are not the usual fintech resume: classical-music stages, a stint around Sennheiser’s audio tech, nightclubs, and years working with artists. They started Talentir in 2022 with a genuinely strange idea: a stock market for YouTube videos. Retail investors could buy a slice of a video’s future ad revenue, and creators could sell that future income upfront to fund the next production. It was a tokenization play, crypto under the hood, and it was good enough to win real backing. In 2023 the company raised a pre-seed led by Bitpanda CEO Eric Demuth, with the founders of Storebox alongside.

The marketplace did not take off the way they hoped. Steiner is unusually honest about it: “Every startup has to be right on the edge of failing once, to then rise like a phoenix from the ashes.” But to run that marketplace, the team had to solve a deeply unglamorous problem. A single YouTube video can have several owners, different production companies, and split rights, and YouTube pays out once a month to a single account. Distributing that money accurately, across borders, with the right invoices and tax handling, is brutal. So they built a backend to do it automatically, for themselves.

They did not realize what they had built. As Steiner puts it: “We had no idea we had built such a powerful backend, perfectly suited for the whole rights-management and split-payments problem.” Then came the moment that turned a tokenization startup into a fintech.

Talentir shipped what it claims was a world first: per-second YouTube payouts. Instead of waiting until the end of the month, a creator could watch ad revenue land by the second, predicted in real time by a small forecasting algorithm and settled on stablecoin rails. It was, on paper, a gift to creators.

The creators shrugged. When Talentir pitched individual YouTubers on getting paid every second instead of once a month, the typical answer was, in Steiner’s recounting, “actually not so great, I don’t really need that.” The feature that was supposed to be magic landed as a nice-to-have.

Then the same pitch went to an agency, the kind that manages dozens or hundreds of creators. The agency took that identical feature to the very same creators, and, in Steiner’s words, “they were all blown away.” Nothing about the product had changed. The buyer had. A creator paying themselves does not feel the pain of monthly, cross-border, multi-rights payouts. An agency paying 500 people a month feels nothing but that pain. That gap is the entire company. Talentir stopped trying to win creators one by one and started selling the plumbing to whoever had to move money to many people at once.

Here is the part that reads like a press release and hides a year of grind. The new B2B product was working before the round even started. The founders’ problem was not survival, it was speed: how to put more fuel on a thing that already worked. Just before Christmas they decided to go to their own investors for a top-up to hire two or three salespeople and a second engineer.

Then it compounded. Existing backers Noia Capital and Cambrena re-upped first. BFC, in from the very first pre-seed, went again, which Steiner notes is striking given they originally backed a completely different idea. A friend introduced the founders to Shapers, whose partner happened to be in Vienna; they met at a café on Karlsplatz, and the fit was obvious within minutes. Shapers had backed Bitpanda, N26, and Qonto, knew the ecosystem cold, wrote a first ticket within about five days, and then introduced Talentir to seven or eight investors in his circle. Six of them invested.

The round was led by Redstone out of Berlin, and it pulled in a cap table that does not belong on a six-person seed. Inovia Capital came in, represented by Patrick Pichette, the former global CFO of Google, alongside Inovia partner Raif Jacobs, himself a former CFO of Deliveroo and former head of Google’s EMEA finance. Tenity from Switzerland joined, as did the existing crew. Larger overseas funds circled but arrived late, and got the same answer: let’s talk for the next round. The capital is going almost nowhere fashionable. Steiner is blunt about the priorities: “It is mainly sales, compliance, and licensing. That is the most important thing right now.”

Know which funds are actively deploying right now? Fundmomentum.vc tracks freshly raised VC funds (970+) and personal investor signals across the globe - so you know exactly who has dry powder and is ready to write checks. If you’re raising, stop guessing which investors are the right fit. Now, data is also available via MCP APIs. [View our deck made with Gamma]

The pivot is not a re-emphasis, it is close to a clean exit. Talentir has fully stopped onboarding creators directly on YouTube. It thanked its most important YouTube partners for the collaboration and moved them over to the B2B side. The investors actively pushed the founders to abstract away, even divest, the original product, on the logic that anything pulling focus from the B2B engine should come off the table.

The technical bet that makes it work is one they made when it was unpopular. Talentir settles on stablecoins in the backend, a choice people openly questioned years ago, and which competitors would now have to rebuild their entire architecture to copy. The team wanted to use Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for roughly 1.1 billion dollars, but it was too expensive, so they built the crypto rails themselves, end to end. Crucially, none of this is visible to the customer. “It does no one any good to talk about hashes in their accounting,” Steiner says. The product is a regulated Merchant of Record on the payout side: Talentir takes on the compliance, the tax, the recipient onboarding, and issues the invoices, so the customer does not have to become a fintech. The framing Steiner uses for the whole category is the cleanest line in the interview: “Stripe solved pay-in. But pay-out, with different regulation in every market, with VAT and all of it, is still extremely complex.” That is the gap, and competitors like Tipalti, Trolley, and Payoneer mostly run on traditional rails that settle in days, not seconds. Talentir already processes seven figures of payouts a day, and was profitable before this raise.

1. The infrastructure is often the company. Talentir’s marketplace was the idea; the backend it built to run the marketplace was the business. Founders fall in love with the front-facing product and treat the plumbing as a cost. Sometimes the plumbing is the only thing with a billion-dollar market behind it. Before you kill a struggling product, audit what you built to make it work. The unglamorous internal tool that automates your own hardest operational problem is also, by definition, the tool every company with that problem will pay for.

2. Sell to whoever actually feels the pain. The same per-second payout feature was a yawn to individual creators and a revelation to agencies. The feature did not change; the buyer did. When adoption is lukewarm, do not assume the product is wrong. Ask who in the value chain carries the pain you remove. Move up or down a layer until you find the person whose whole week is the problem you solve. That is your customer, even if it is not who you built it for.

3. Bet on the unfashionable backend early. Talentir committed to stablecoin settlement when people laughed, and it is now a moat rivals cannot retrofit without rebuilding everything. Deep, early infrastructure bets feel reckless precisely because they are not yet consensus. The reward is not speed today, it is a defensibility that compounds: by the time the market agrees with you, copying you means tearing out their foundations. Pick one such bet you can defend, and make it before it is obvious.

4. Make the hard part invisible, and own the risk. Customers do not want crypto, licenses, or hashes in their books; they want the payout to just work. Talentir hides all of it and, as a Merchant of Record, absorbs the regulatory risk itself. The most valuable position in a complex, regulated workflow is the one that lets the customer not think about it. Abstract the complexity completely, take on the liability others are scared of, and you become infrastructure rather than a tool people evaluate.

5. Know when your wedge is a feature, not a company. The YouTube product was real and even growing 10 to 20 percent a month, but it was capped: a finite pool of mid-tier creators, the biggest names already locked up, and thin net margin after the work. Steiner saw it was “not the billion-dollar case” and had the discipline to walk while it still worked. Growth is not the same as a market. Be honest about whether your wedge opens into something vast or tops out, and be willing to leave a good small business to go build the large one hiding next to it.

Raising (soon)? I’ve helped 50+ startups to accelerate their fundraising campaigns and match them with the right investors. If you want hands-on support - from pitch refinement to warm intros to term sheet negotiation - let’s talk.

The money funds sales, compliance, and licensing, the moat you cannot simply code your way to overnight. Two senior hires are already in: Moritz Putzhammer, the ex-Trality founder who originally talked Steiner and Kares into starting the company, to build the growth structures, and Nik Redl, who sold Mokker.ai, as founding engineer and head of AI. Two senior salespeople start soon. The near-term target is €100M in annual payout volume, with the billion as the line after that.

The free episode is the story. The paid Playbook breaks down the fundraise itself: the exact timing rules Steiner now swears by, how one café introduction became six investors, and why a profitable team turned down 1.5 million in committed capital on purpose. Read it down below.