Problem

Grade addresses the operational and compliance burden of paying creators, contractors, and other outcome-based workers at scale. Conventional payroll is built around hours, while creator and contractor compensation may depend on videos delivered, views, conversions, milestones, targets, or other results. Companies that try to manage these arrangements themselves often rely on spreadsheets, manual approvals, fragmented invoices, slow payouts, and error-prone tax and compliance processes. The pain becomes especially acute when a business hires creators across borders: it must handle KYC, tax forms, currency and payment-method differences, reporting obligations, and potential worker-classification risk.

The clearest use case is a company or marketplace running a large creator or UGC program. Instead of manually reconciling hundreds or thousands of creator payments, the customer can define flat-fee or performance-based rules, approve a batch, and pay everyone through one workflow and one finance invoice. This turns a high-volume, administratively expensive process into a scalable payout operation.

Product / Service

Grade is an API-first performance-payout and merchant-of-record platform. Customers connect it to their existing systems, import or synchronize creator and performance data, configure flat fees, bonuses, or performance rules, and trigger payouts through the API or dashboard. Grade aggregates performance data, calculates what each creator is owed, supports batch approval, and provides real-time payout and reporting visibility. Creators onboard themselves without needing to join a separate platform or download an app.

The delivery model is designed to remove the financial and regulatory infrastructure from the customer’s stack. Grade acts as the contractual counterparty and handles KYC, identity verification, tax-form collection, reporting, invoicing, global payout execution, and compliance, while the customer receives one invoice rather than managing individual creator invoices. The company says its marketplace API can support payouts in more than 190 countries, with local transfers and services such as Wise and PayPal, and that customers pay per payout rather than a monthly platform fee.

Market

Grade sits at the intersection of creator-economy software, global contractor payments, payroll infrastructure, and marketplace payment APIs, with a distinctive emphasis on compensation tied to output rather than time. Grade itself positions the product as analogous to Deel or Gusto, but for work completed instead of hours. Its adjacent competitive set includes creator-payout platforms such as Dots and Gigapay, as well as general marketplace infrastructure such as Stripe Connect; those products overlap on onboarding, tax documentation, compliance, and global payouts, while Grade differentiates around configurable performance compensation and a merchant-of-record workflow.

The company is an early-stage but active YC Winter 2026 startup founded in 2025 by Lotanna Ezeike and James Heaney, with a reported two-person team in San Francisco. It is showing live usage rather than appearing pre-launch: Grade reports more than 3,200 creators paid across 190-plus countries, and its YC profile says companies used it to pay out more than $380,000 to creators in the preceding 30 days, up 120% month over month. These figures indicate meaningful early transaction traction, although the available materials do not disclose revenue, gross margins, or the number of paying customers.