Beluga: creator marketing with paid-media mechanics

What it does

Beluga runs creator marketing as a managed, measurable campaign channel. A brand gives it an audience, budget and desired outcome; Beluga sources and vets creators, negotiates rates, handles contracts and payments, and provides per-creator tracking links and reporting. The YC profile calls this creator marketing that scales like paid ads. The homepage makes the buyer fit clearer: growth teams that want creator distribution without building a large creator-operations staff.

Why I’d look closer

Beluga’s useful detail is the connection between audience fit and attribution. The homepage shows a sample creator shortlist with audience-fit percentages and describes campaigns where each creator receives a unique link. It also says the service is month-to-month, with no retainer, annual contract or minimum commitment, and charges a 20% fee on top of the creator budget so the full budget goes to creators. That is a straightforward commercial model, though the buyer still needs to define what counts as a successful outcome.

The site reports 3M+ client views since March, $100K+ saved in rate negotiations and 3,500+ signups in two weeks for one Series F client. It also presents a Codebuff case study that moved from about 200 to 1,200 daily active users after a creator campaign. These are company-reported case-study figures, not independent incrementality evidence. They are useful enough to make a campaign test concrete, but not enough to assume every category will travel the same way.

The founders bring operating experience on both sides of the marketplace. The team page says Jack led AI R&D at a startup and built Beluga’s matching and optimization systems; Fernando worked with Meta clients including American Airlines and later led sales at Dare Drop. The page says the team previously managed campaigns across thousands of creators and millions in spend. That background explains the emphasis on negotiation and operations as much as software.

What I’d ask

How does Beluga separate creator-attributed conversions from demand that would have arrived anyway? What are the audience-quality and brand-safety checks, and who owns the content rights? I’d run one campaign with a defined control or holdout where possible, compare creator-level economics to paid social, and inspect the reporting before scaling the spend.

My editorial take

Beluga is a sensible shortlist for a company with a clear audience and a need to move faster than an internal creator team can. The 20% fee is easy to understand; the hard part is proving that the creator distribution produces durable, attributable outcomes rather than impressive top-of-funnel volume.

Quick facts

Field	Sourced detail
Buyer fit	Growth and marketing teams running creator-led acquisition
Commercial model	Creator budget plus a 20% fee; month-to-month, company-stated
Proof signal	Company-reported views, savings and Codebuff case study
Workflow	Sourcing, vetting, negotiation, contracts, payments and tracking

Sources checked

Checked 2026-09-19.

Source	Used for
YC company profile	Product definition and founder backgrounds
Beluga homepage	Commercial model, campaign workflow and company-reported case studies
Beluga team	Public professional founder and team context

Cohort context

Beluga is listed in Spring 2025. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 97 of 143 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label B2B (67.8%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.