Beluga

Beluga (also referred to as Beluga Labs) is a San Francisco-based company that operates creator/influencer marketing campaigns end-to-end on behalf of brands, with the stated aim of making the channel behave like a paid acquisition channel: the client sets an audience target and a budget, and Beluga handles execution. Its scope of work covers creator sourcing and vetting, audience-fit matching, rate pricing and negotiation, contracting, briefs and draft review, deliverable management, creator payments, per-creator tracking links, live reporting and post-campaign analysis. Clients receive the same dashboard Beluga uses to run the campaign.

The company frames the core problem as a headcount constraint rather than a knowledge gap: it cites one large creator-marketing spender that employs 30+ people to manage creator partnerships, with each rep able to handle roughly 18 creators, and that said it could not deploy an additional $2M into the channel without further hiring. Beluga's positioning is that sourcing, negotiation, coordination, payments and reporting should not require dedicated in-house staff at every company, which in turn allows more creators to be tested and smaller, better-matched channels to be used. Its negotiation approach models what each placement is worth and compares offers on implied CPM.

Beluga is listed by Y Combinator in the Spring 2025 batch under the Marketing, Advertising, Creator Economy and AI categories. Third-party company research describes an earlier trajectory: an initial "Kubernetes for agentic workers" concept, a 2025 pivot toward agents for content creators, then creator bookkeeping and tax automation, before moving to brand-deal support and creator tools; the same source states legacy bookkeeping features were to remain available through the IRS extension deadline of 2026-10-15.

Founding story

The founders came at creator marketing from both sides of the market. Fernando Young worked on the brand side at Dare Drop, helping gaming publishers run creator campaigns, where the operating model remained agency-like and coordination-heavy. The team also spent time on the creator side while attempting to build a "Rippling for the self-employed," working with creators on taxes, which exposed the difficulty creators face in finding well-matched deals, aligning expectations, running campaigns and getting paid on time. Concluding that both brands and creators were stuck in spreadsheets, email threads and manual follow-up, they built Beluga to run the channel end-to-end.

Business model

Managed, software-enabled service sold on a month-to-month basis with no retainers, annual contracts or minimum commitments. Beluga charges a single transparent fee of 20% on top of the client's creator budget, so the full budgeted amount goes to creators. The engagement includes campaign strategy, creator sourcing and vetting, rate negotiation, contracts and creator payments, per-creator tracking links, live reporting and direct access to an account lead.

A 20% fee charged on top of the client's monthly creator budget, billed month-to-month and cancellable at any time.

Traction

Since starting in March, the company reports generating over 3M views for clients spanning Y Combinator startups to Series F companies and saving clients over $100k in creator rate negotiations. It reports driving 3,500+ signups in two weeks for one Series F client, and, in a case study, helping take Freebuff — Codebuff's free coding agent — from roughly 50-200 to a peak of 1,200 daily active users around a relaunch, with each creator tracked via a unique link. A jobs aggregator estimated site traffic of about 2.9K monthly visits as of July 2026 and no open positions.

Latest developments

Beluga is presented as a fully managed creator marketing service and published a Y Combinator launch post, "Beluga - Creator Marketing on Autopilot," describing end-to-end campaign operations. Reported results to date include 3M+ views generated, $100k+ saved in negotiations, and the Codebuff/Freebuff daily-active-user case study. The team includes a Head of Account Management/Creator Growth, Zan, in addition to the two founders.