Link-In-Bio Startup Beacons in Talks to Buy Portals App; TikTok Reveals Shopping Ambitions

Beacons is holding these talks on the back of a new funding round. It closed a $23 million Series A funding deal in the second quarter, according to two people familiar with the company. The valuation and lead investor couldn’t be learned. The new money adds to more than $6 million in funding previously raised from investors including Variant Fund, Caffeinated Capital and Polymath Capital Partners, according to The Information’s Creator Economy Database.

If three-year-old Beacons completes the deal, it could operate more facets of a creator’s business, an expansion that would help distinguish itself from other link-in-bio startups. The San Francisco startup offers a free version that allows unlimited links and page analytics. It also offers a version for $10 per month, which lets creators host their website on a custom domain, removes Beacons branding and provides advanced analytics. The Portals app could give Beacons’ creators another way to interact with their fans through chat and video rooms, perhaps as an additional feature or premium offering. —Erin Woo contributed reporting

Here’s what else is going on…

TikTok Tries to Find Its E-Commerce Lane 

When at first you don’t succeed, try again. TikTok is hiring staff to build its own product fulfillment centers in the U.S., Axios reported. That’s an indication that the short-form video company is doubling down on expanding ecommerce, even after it slowed live shopping efforts in Europe and the U.S. The move to invest in warehouses shows that commerce is still a top priority for the video app. (A spokesperson for TikTok did not comment directly on the report, but said the company is focused on its e-commerce marketplace TikTok Shop in the U.K. and Southeast Asia.)

Open roles seek employees to plan and design fulfillment centers and manage transport and inventory movement, according to a job posting. Operating warehouses and storing products made Amazon a retail juggernaut. But these capital-intensive and high-risk businesses have also produced flame-outs. A slew of instant delivery startups, including Gopuff,  Jokr and Fridge No More, collectively have burned through hundreds millions of dollars of cash operating warehouses and delivering product. (Fridge No More went out of business in March, while Jokr pulled out of the U.S. and Europe to focus on Latin America.) Even Amazon doesn’t always get the complicated entanglement of logistics right: it created more than 200 million square feet of new facilities over the last two and a half years, which have been inefficient and drove the commerce giant to cancel plans for more than a dozen fulfillment centers.

If TikTok can figure out the logistics side, it could be a fierce competitor to Amazon. The ByteDance-owned company boasts demand from a large, young audience and viral clothes, lifestyle products and electronic gadgets trends that could translate into millions of buyers. Taking control of logistics could allow TikTok to prepare inventory to keep up surges in demand as products go viral. If anything, its plans should at least spur Amazon to take a fresh look at its creator strategy, which touches different mediums but has yet to tap into the bulk of young users. 

Deals & Debuts

See The Information’s Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.

Patreon’s internal valuation fell 70% over the past year, according to a memo sent to staff last month, Insider reported. It has also postponed its plans to go public in order to preserve more cash, the report notes. (Read how much the company might now be worth). 

Elenas, a Colombia-based social commerce startup, raised $20 million in Series B funding led by DILA Capital. This round brings the startups’ total funding to $28 million. 

Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch, is launching Rye, a Web3 shopping startup, alongside four co-founders, Forbes reported. Rye has raised $14 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm.

Patreon also announced product updates, including to its billing, which will allow creators to charge fans monthly on the date they joined, rather than the first day of every month. It also announced improvements to the audio player on its app, which now allows listeners to change playback speed. 

OnlyFans announced its $500,000 grant paid to non-profit organization Child Rescue Coalition to support development of technology to fight the distribution of sexual abuse of children-related content.  

Overheard 

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the popularity of BeReal could be fleeting. 

“If you look at the whimsical, fun element, it’s basically this constant pursuit of finding new things that feel authentic, whether it was initially just being able to update your profile at college, being able to have a status update, being able to take an ephemeral photo or post a story,” he said in an interview with The Verge, explaining that over time, people get used to such features and creators professional business use for them. 

‘At the end of the day, a lot of the creators also care about, ‘Where am I actually going to be able to most effectively reach the people in my community? Where am I going to get the most engagement and have the highest-quality engagement? And then, ultimately, how am I going to be able to support myself and make a good living doing this?’” he said.

What We’re Reading And Watching

• Chris Dixon Keeps the Crypto Faith (The Information)

• Why creator houses rarely last (The Publish Press)

• The Creator Economy will look like the Music Business (Arm The Creators)