Two recent moves in the creator economy and robotics show how technology businesses are increasingly being built around a powerful combination of talent, capital, intellectual property and artificial intelligence.
Steven Bartlett is putting substantial capital behind creators, while Travis Kalanick is recruiting elite AI talent to give robots greater intelligence in the physical world.
Bartlett, the entrepreneur and host of The Diary of a CEO, has teamed up with Authentic Brands Group to launch OBSN, a new venture that plans to invest as much as $400 million in creator-led businesses over the coming years.
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The initiative is designed to move beyond the traditional influencer model, where creators primarily monetize audiences through advertising, sponsorships and platform revenue.
OBSN aims to provide creators with capital, infrastructure, media exposure, product development, licensing, strategic partnerships and global distribution. Bartlett’s Steven.com brings experience in media and audience development.
While Authentic contributes expertise in building and managing consumer brands and intellectual property. The significance is that creators are increasingly being treated not simply as personalities, but as potential owners of businesses and intellectual property.
A creator with millions of followers already possesses something valuable: distribution. The challenge is converting that distribution into durable companies with products, technology, retail relationships and recurring revenue.
OBSN is therefore attempting to address a structural problem in the creator economy. Instead of creators assembling separate agencies, investors, licensing companies and marketing partners, the venture proposes a more integrated model.
Its ambitions also extend into media, with plans for creator-economy news, analysis and live experiences. At the same time, the robotics industry is pursuing an equally consequential transformation.
Travis Kalanick’s Atoms has recruited Vikas Chandra, a longtime Meta AI executive who worked on artificial intelligence for Meta’s smart glasses, as its vice president of AI. Chandra is expected to work on what he describes as foundation models for the physical world.
The appointment comes after Atoms raised $1.7 billion in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The company is developing robotics technology for industries including food, mining and transportation, while Kalanick has framed the broader mission around digitizing physical-world operations.
Chandra’s background is particularly relevant because robotics presents a different AI challenge from software applications. Machines operating in the physical world must perceive environments, understand changing conditions and make decisions quickly enough to act safely.
His experience working on AI capable of operating within constrained hardware environments at Meta could therefore be relevant to Atoms’ ambitions. Bartlett’s creator strategy and Kalanick’s robotics strategy illustrate two different frontiers of technology investment.
One is attempting to turn human attention into scalable companies; the other is attempting to turn artificial intelligence into physical capability. The common denominator is infrastructure. Creators need financing, distribution and business-building expertise to transform audiences into companies.
Robots need capital, advanced models and specialized engineering to transform machines into useful autonomous systems. As capital increasingly flows toward both creator-led businesses and physical AI.
The next generation of technology companies may be defined less by a single product and more by the ecosystems built around talent, data, intellectual property and intelligent machines.