Our Approach
How We Think
Seed to Series A in creator tools, social commerce, and digital media infrastructure. We've held this thesis since before the market had a name for it.
Why creator tools now
The structural shift that interests us isn't about individual creators going viral. It's about the long arc of economic power moving from platform balance sheets to individual hands. For two decades, platforms captured most of the value generated by content. The creator got the audience; the platform got the business model. That relationship is changing — and it's changing because the infrastructure to support creator-owned economic models now exists.
We started seeing this in 2016 and 2017, before the category had a name. Direct monetization tools, subscription platforms, fan membership infrastructure — these were edge projects at the time. The mainstream capital narrative was still about platforms, not the pipes that sat underneath them. We went the other direction.
What's happened since is the market caught up with the thesis. Creator economy is now a named category with venture capital dedicated to it, consumer behavior data supporting it, and a generation of founders who grew up as creators entering the industry. The window where this is a contrarian bet has largely closed. But the infrastructure buildout is still early. There is still significant capital formation to happen at the infrastructure layer — the tools and platforms that the next hundred thousand professional creators will run their businesses on.
What "infrastructure" means to us
We use the word deliberately. Infrastructure, to us, means the underlying systems that enable value creation by others — not the value creation itself. We are not investors in content. We don't back creator brands, influencer-led consumer products, or media companies whose business model is audience attention. Those are real businesses. They're just not ours.
What we back: subscription and membership platforms that give creators recurring revenue independent of platform algorithms. Monetization rails that let creators sell directly to their audiences — digital goods, access, services, catalog. Commerce infrastructure that bridges creator audiences and purchasing behavior for brands. Analytics and distribution tools that give creators and media companies visibility into what their content is actually worth and how to allocate attention accordingly. The pipes, not the water.
This distinction matters at the early stage because it shapes what kind of founder we're looking for. Infrastructure companies attract founders who think systemically, who are interested in solving coordination problems across thousands of creative businesses rather than building one extraordinary creative business. That instinct — infrastructure over content — is something we look for explicitly in founder conversations.
Stage discipline
We invest at pre-seed and seed, and occasionally at Series A when we have thesis conviction and the founding team has meaningful operator experience in the category. We do not invest at growth stage. We don't follow companies from seed to Series B and beyond as a rule — we're not structured to be that kind of investor.
The pre-product-market-fit stage is where we believe operator judgment creates the most alpha. At seed, the question is whether the founding team understands the problem better than anyone else — not whether they've proven the market yet. Our job is to assess that understanding. We've spent eight years building context on the creator economy at a granular level. We have views on which monetization models have structural durability, which distribution dynamics are platform-dependent versus platform-agnostic, and which user segments have real willingness to pay. That context is what we bring to early-stage conversations.
What we don't bring: a large fund willing to write a $10M seed check. We write smaller checks, take meaningful board or observer positions, and try to be genuinely useful to founders at the earliest stages of company building. Clearwater works best for founders who want a partner who has seen a lot of this category and can add judgment, not just capital.
What we look for in founders
Creator-native instinct combined with infrastructure architecture thinking. That's the rare combination that builds enduring companies in this space. Founders who have been creators themselves, or who have operated deeply inside the creator economy, understand the problem at a level of specificity that outside investors don't. They know which parts of the creator workflow are genuinely painful versus merely suboptimal. They know the difference between a feature and a platform.
But creator instinct alone doesn't build infrastructure. The founders who build platforms and rails at scale think like architects — they're interested in how systems compose, how they handle edge cases, how they scale across use cases that the founding team didn't originally anticipate. The creator economy has enough consumer-facing product companies. What it still needs is founders who can think at the infrastructure level — who want to build the system that powers the next thousand creator businesses, not be one of them.
We spend a lot of time in founder conversations trying to understand which instinct is dominant. Both are necessary. Neither alone is sufficient.
Fund History
Three successive funds, one thesis.
We have managed three successive funds since 2018, each focused on the same early-stage creator economy thesis as the market has matured.
Clearwater Fund I
$45M
Closed July 2018
Fully deployed
Clearwater Fund II
$80M
Closed May 2021
Fully deployed
Clearwater Fund III
$70M
Closed January 2024
Currently deploying
Positioning
What we look for — and what we skip.
Founders who are a fit for Clearwater typically know it within the first conversation. These are the categories that make the conversation short.
Content-creator brands
Companies whose primary asset is an individual creator's audience, personality, or content output. The business model depends on attention, and attention is platform-allocated. That's not the infrastructure layer we invest in. If the founder's growth thesis is "we'll build an audience," that's a different conversation than ours.
Ad-dependent media companies
Media businesses where the business model is primarily advertising against content. We're interested in the technology and infrastructure that media companies use, not in being a media company investor. The distinction matters: analytics platforms for media companies are infrastructure; media companies themselves are not our focus.
Consumer apps without infrastructure angle
Consumer apps that serve creators as end users but have no infrastructure or platform component — pure productivity tools, niche social networks, creator-facing consumer apps without a business model that scales through the creator economy's supply chain. We look for the B2B2C dynamics that indicate the creator economy's infrastructure layer, not the consumer layer on top.