Beluga

Co-founder @trybeluga (YC X25) • making creator marketing as easy to run as a paid ad

Beluga is a managed service that runs creator marketing campaigns end to end for companies, handling sourcing, vetting, negotiation, contracts, payments, and tracking so brands can test and scale without building an internal creator team. The pitch to founders and growth leads is that spend should scale with performance while headcount stays flat, since one of the biggest spenders in creator marketing employs 30+ people just to manage creators, with each rep only able to handle around 18 . Beluga assigns a unique link to every creator so clients see exactly which placements drive clicks and signups, using the same dashboard the team uses to operate the campaign. The company was started by Fernando Young, based in San Francisco and previously at HubSpot, Dare Drop, and Facebook , alongside co-founder and CTO Jack Swisher, who previously worked at Bubble and Berkshire Grey . Beluga Labs is part of Y Combinator's X25 batch and is backed by Goodwater Capital, Y Combinator, and TwentyTwo Ventures, along with angels from Dover and Eight Sleep . The team originally started building "Rippling for content creators," focused on automated taxes and finances , and has since refocused on the buyer side of the creator economy. The launch matters because creator campaigns still tend to be run as one-off deals rather than a repeatable performance channel, and Beluga is trying to convert that workflow into something operators can budget like paid media. Early proof points on the site include a Codebuff case study where the AI coding tool relaunched with a benchmarked Opus 4.5 harness and, matched with YouTube creators developers watch for AI tool reviews, moved from around 200 to a peak of 1,200 daily active users . For founders evaluating creator marketing against paid acquisition, Beluga is positioning itself as the operating layer that makes the comparison possible.

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