Patreon

Liquid AI

Patreon

Patreon takes a percentage of every payment processed through the platform. It used to run three tiers — 5%, 8% and 12% depending on how many features a creator wanted — and creators who signed up back then are still on those rates.

Everyone joining now pays a flat 8%.

On top of the platform fee, payment processing fees (typically 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) are passed to either the creator or patron depending on the plan. The combined take rate means Patreon captures roughly 8-15% of the money flowing through the platform.

The business scales beautifully. More creators attract more patrons.

More patrons increase creator earnings. Higher earnings attract more creators.

And Patreon's cut grows proportionally with every dollar processed. Creators have been paid more than $8 billion through the platform since it launched in 2013.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Patreon

Jack Conte was one half of Pomplamoose, an indie music duo that went viral on YouTube in the late 2000s. Their cover of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" got millions of views.

Their original music was critically praised. And they were barely making enough to pay rent.

The math was brutal. A million YouTube views paid about $1,500 in ad revenue.

Conte spent weeks producing high-quality music videos that cost thousands to make. The economics didn't work.

YouTube's ad model paid creators fractions of a penny per view. Spotify paid fractions of a penny per stream.

For mid-tier creators — popular enough to have a real audience but not famous enough for brand deals — the internet was a machine that turned creative labor into pennies.

In 2013, Conte teamed up with Sam Yam, a college roommate and developer at AdRoll. Their idea was simple: let fans pay creators directly through monthly subscriptions.

Not per-video donations. Not tips.

Recurring monthly payments — like a Netflix subscription but for individual creators. They called it Patreon, from "patron of the arts." The platform launched in May 2013 and signed up its first creator the same week.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Patreon

Patreon grew through creator evangelism. When a podcaster or YouTuber told their audience "support me on Patreon," that was free marketing to exactly the right audience.

Every creator who joins becomes a distribution channel.

The platform expanded beyond its indie roots by courting bigger creators. Podcasters were the first breakout category — shows like Chapo Trap House, True Crime Obsessed, and Last Podcast on the Left built six-figure monthly incomes on Patreon.

Then YouTubers, writers, musicians, and visual artists followed.

International expansion drove the next phase. Patreon now supports payments in multiple currencies and serves creators in over 180 countries.

The creator economy is global — a manga artist in Japan can have patrons in Brazil paying in US dollars, processed through Patreon seamlessly.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Patreon

Platform risk is the core vulnerability. Patreon is entirely dependent on creators choosing to use it.

If YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok build sufficiently good subscription tools (YouTube Memberships already exists, Instagram Subscriptions launched), creators might consolidate onto the platforms where their audiences already live. Why send fans to Patreon when they can subscribe directly on YouTube?

The moderation challenge is constant. Patreon hosts content across the entire creative spectrum — including adult content, political commentary, and controversial creators.

Payment processors (Stripe, PayPal) have their own content policies and have pressured Patreon to remove creators. Every moderation decision risks alienating a segment of the creator community.

Revenue concentration is a risk. A relatively small number of top creators generate a disproportionate share of Patreon's revenue.

If a handful of the biggest creators leave for a competing platform or build their own subscription tools, it would materially impact Patreon's business.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Patreon

Patreon Memberships — the core product allowing creators to offer tiered monthly subscriptions with exclusive content, early access, behind-the-scenes material, and community perks. Patreon Commerce — tools for selling digital downloads, merchandise, and one-time purchases directly to fans.

Patreon Community — Discord-style community features built natively into Patreon, including chat, posts, and polls for patron-only spaces. Patreon Video — native video hosting so creators can post exclusive content directly on Patreon instead of using unlisted YouTube links.

Patreon Free Membership — a free tier that lets fans follow creators and access some content, serving as a conversion funnel to paid tiers.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Patreon

Index Ventures led the Series A. Tiger Global led the 2021 round that valued Patreon at $4 billion.

Tiger Global participated in growth rounds. Initialized Capital was an early backer.

DFJ Growth and Wellington Management invested in later rounds. Creators themselves, including YouTubers and podcasters, have been informal ambassadors and some have invested personally.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.