Fanvue's founder nearly went bankrupt. Now he's hit $200M ARR.

Fanvue CEO Joel Morris just told the world his AI-creator platform hit $200M in annual recurring revenue. The catch: three years ago he was pitching investors from his father's villa in Spain with no air conditioning and almost no cash left. The man who walked away from 2.4M YouTube subscribers nearly went bankrupt building the company that now prints nine figures.

What actually happened?

On May 23, Fortune published a first-person essay by Morris, co-founder and CEO of AI-creator monetization platform Fanvue. As a teenager he built the JMX gaming channel to roughly 2.4M subscribers posting daily FIFA and Fortnite videos, then pivoted to YouTube boxing. Around age 19 he quit it all to build a company, reasoning you can't half-build a startup and half-run a channel.

The bet nearly killed him. By the summer of 2023, the founders discovered they had far less cash than expected, their lease had run out, and investor outreach produced nothing but rejection emails. They retreated to Morris's father's villa in Spain on the last days of runway, where he pitched back to back and refused to fly home until he closed a lifeline investor. It was the kind of last-ditch gamble that usually ends in a quiet shutdown, not a comeback.

From that bottom, Fanvue strung together 26 consecutive record months. The platform scaled from about $300,000 in monthly revenue in late 2023 to over $10 million per month by the end of 2025, according to Sacra. In January it announced a $22M Series A and a roughly $100 million annualized run rate, up about 450% year over year, per Business Wire.

The scale today is real. Fanvue reports around 17 million monthly active users and between 250,000 and 325,000 creators, and it grew global headcount from 42 to 115 employees in a single year. AI-generated creators drove roughly 15% of revenue in a recent month, and 93% of creators now use at least one of Fanvue's proprietary AI tools, per Wikipedia.

Why does this matter for creators?

This is the clearest proof yet that AI-native creator monetization is real money, not a demo-reel novelty. A platform built explicitly on AI creators went from a near-death summer to nine figures in under three years, and serious investors piled in behind it. When a category survives that and comes back with 26 straight record months, the thesis stops being speculative. The AI-creator wave isn't coming, it's already here and already profitable.

But the Fanvue arc also exposes the real question for 2026. The gold rush is no longer about whether to monetize an audience directly. It's about which platform's economics and tooling let a creator keep the most and sell the most, once "AI creator" stops being a novelty and becomes table stakes. That's a fee-math question as much as a feature question.

"Most people see the $200 million ARR. They don't see the summer in Spain with no air conditioning, a dwindling bank account, and investor rejection emails piling up."

Joel Morris, Co-founder and CEO, Fanvue, writing in Fortune

What's the bigger picture?

Fanvue's best-known AI creator, Aitana López, has roughly 350K Instagram followers and showed a fully virtual persona can pull real revenue. The Series A was led by Inner Circle, whose portfolio includes Revolut, Anthropic, and xAI. That's serious capital betting AI creators are a durable category, not a passing meme. When investors like that write checks, the rest of the market follows.

Here's the catch buried in the celebration. Fanvue's record run is built on the same monetization stack every rival sells: subscriptions, pay-per-view, paid DMs, and tips. Once every platform offers AI tools and AI creators, that stack stops being a moat.

The next leg of creator income has to come from somewhere the incumbents don't reach. That's the gap the whole category is now racing to fill, and it's where the next $200 million stories will actually be written.

What does Fanvault think?

Fanvault's read: the AI-creator gold rush Fanvue just proved out is exactly the wave Fanvault was built to ride, only at a lower take rate and with more ways to actually sell. Fanvue charges a 15% platform fee, while Fanvault charges 8%, so creators keep 92%. Where Fanvue sells the standard subscription-and-DM stack, Fanvault pairs it with an in-profile storefront (auctions and buy-it-now drops for authenticated memorabilia), wishlists, and a conversational layer that runs listings, scheduling, and DM triage in-app or on Telegram. A record built on paywalled posts is impressive, but the next nine figures in the creator economy will come from selling more than a subscription.

Fanvue proved the AI-creator economy is real. The question now isn't whether creators can build a business on it. It's who lets them keep the most of what they build.