Team

The Partners

Operator backgrounds. Creator economy from the inside.

Managing Partner

Priya Anand

Priya started as a product manager at a major social media platform, where she worked on features touching creator monetization at scale. She moved to a video streaming company to lead creator monetization directly — building the products and partnerships that helped individual creators turn platform audiences into recurring revenue. In 2017, she founded Clearwater with the conviction that the infrastructure enabling creators to own their economic relationships didn't yet exist, and that building it represented a generational investment opportunity.

Now in Clearwater's third fund, Priya has spent nine years building the category context that makes early-stage conviction possible. She was writing checks to creator economy infrastructure companies before the term existed in LP presentations or venture databases. That early positioning — and the pattern recognition that comes from it — is the core of what Clearwater brings to the earliest-stage founders it backs.

Focus at Clearwater: Direct monetization platforms, creator-owned business infrastructure, fund strategy, LP relationships, and portfolio company governance. Leads investments where the thesis alignment question is whether the company is building infrastructure or content.

General Partner

Desmond Blake

Desmond was head of business development at a mid-size digital media company during a period when the line between social media and e-commerce was just beginning to blur. He worked directly on platform partnerships and creator programs before moving to a consumer-tech accelerator as an operating partner for three years, where he advised early-stage founders on business model design and go-to-market in digital media and consumer social contexts.

He joined Clearwater in 2019 to lead investments in social commerce and digital-native brand infrastructure — the categories where creator audiences become commerce channels and where the distinction between content and transaction disappears. His background in business development gives him a particular lens on how these companies build distribution and revenue partnerships before traditional sales motions exist.

Focus at Clearwater: Social commerce platforms, creator-to-brand partnership infrastructure, DTC commerce aggregation, and the commercial development of portfolio companies. Leads investments where the key question is whether the company has a structural commerce distribution advantage.

Principal

Sofia Marchetti

Sofia grew up as a content creator before becoming an investor, which gives her a ground-level perspective on which creator tools actually change behavior and which are productivity theater. She studied media economics at UCLA, where she focused on the structural economics of digital content distribution — the relationship between reach, monetization, and platform dependency that shapes how professional creators build sustainable businesses.

She joined Clearwater in 2021 and has developed a particular focus on Latin American creator markets and cross-border monetization infrastructure — a geography and use case where the creator economy's growth rate is highest but the infrastructure for creator-owned economics is least developed. Her view is that the tooling and rails built for North American creators will need significant adaptation to work in high-growth international markets, and that the companies building for those markets from inception represent significant opportunity.

Focus at Clearwater: Creator tools diligence, social commerce platforms, Latin American market development, cross-border monetization infrastructure, and early-stage sourcing. Leads sourcing in markets and subcategories where creator economy infrastructure is in earlier development.

Find Us

Los Angeles-based. Founder-accessible.

The best way to reach us is email. We respond to founders building in our focus areas.

Office

10250 Constellation Boulevard, Suite 2100
Los Angeles, CA 90067

Founded

2017

[email protected]

Phone

+1 (310) 555-0267