The Payment Processor That Actually Wants to Replace Itself

01 /The Concept

Creem describes itself as a "financial operating system" for startups and creators.

At first glance – and judging by the homepage – it looks like yet another payment processor. It can accept payments globally and handles local tax remittance, which saves startups the hassle of navigating jurisdictional tax compliance on their own.

On pricing, Creem positions itself as one of the most competitive options on the market. Where other payment processors reportedly charge up to 15% for comparable services, Creem takes 3.9% plus $0.40 per transaction.

It also includes an AI assistant that answers developers – who sell through the platform – any financial or business question they might have: "What's my subscriber churn rate?" "Which country drives the most sales?" "What's my average order value?" And so on.

All of that seems fairly standard. So it's worth asking why a 10-month-old Estonian startup just closed a €1.8M round on top of its initial €150K seed – and what the investors are actually betting on.

Probably what comes next.

02 /Why It Matters

Creem's first major product milestone was becoming a Merchant of Record (MoR) – and this is where the story gets more interesting.

As a Merchant of Record, Creem doesn't just process payments on behalf of a seller. It becomes the official intermediary between buyer and seller – it receives the payment, handles tax remittance and currency conversion, and then forwards the net proceeds to the developer. From the buyer's perspective, Creem is the named seller on the receipt, not the developer.

The MoR model means Creem assumes full legal and financial responsibility for each transaction, including dispute resolution and chargebacks. In exchange, it gets to handle all the messy downstream financial obligations: withholding and remitting local taxes, converting currencies, and ensuring the developer receives a clean payment in their preferred currency. This is what makes it viable for small startups and solo creators to sell globally without becoming tax compliance experts in every country they serve.

Now in beta, Creem's next move is revenue splitting.

The concept: several people – even across different countries – can launch a product together and sell it without needing a formal legal entity or accounting infrastructure. They simply configure the revenue split on the platform, and Creem automatically routes each party's share to them as payments come in.

For larger companies, this means automating commission and bonus payouts to team members, independent agents, and affiliate partners – removing that work from the finance team.

For creators, it means automatic split disbursement from collaborative YouTube projects, joint Spotify releases, or any co-created content.

Or consider this: a web studio or marketing agency could agree with a startup to charge a reduced upfront fee plus, say, 3% of the startup's revenue over the next two years. That agreement gets encoded in the platform, and Creem automatically routes the agency's share from incoming revenue – no manual tracking, no chasing invoices.

Creem's longer-term vision is building revenue-sharing marketplaces on top of this infrastructure.

One version: a marketplace for non-dilutive funding. A startup could sell, say, 10% of its revenue for the next two years in exchange for cash now – and Creem would handle the monitoring and disbursement automatically.

Another version: a talent marketplace where startups unable to pay market salaries can offer revenue-linked compensation – for example, 2% of revenue for two years in lieu of a full salary. Creem acts as the neutral trustee ensuring payments flow correctly.

A similar revenue-sharing infrastructure – purpose-built for creators and royalty streams from creative platforms – is what Mozaic ([related review](/review/komandnaja-rabota-na-180-milliardov-dollarov)) built, raising $31M in the process.

03 /Opportunities

A similar but technically more powerful version of this kind of programmable partnership – the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) – was built on blockchain. It never achieved mainstream adoption, for the simple reason that most payments still happen in conventional currency, not crypto.

But the DAO concept attracted enormous interest from startups and creators precisely because it let people define complex partnership rules – including built-in governance mechanisms that allowed those rules to be amended over time. Creem and Mozaic are, in a sense, a second attempt at the same concept, translated into conventional money with the constraints that entails.

The broader trend underneath all of this is the erosion of traditional employment structures – the clean split between company owners and employees. Companies increasingly want to reduce fixed headcount and fixed costs, and to tie compensation more directly to outcomes like revenue or profit. At the same time, more people want to work independently – but complex projects can't be executed alone. The challenge is building coordination structures that let independent people work together, while keeping ownership and revenue sharing transparent and enforceable by a neutral party.

That's the hard part. In traditional corporate structures, the entity controlling the money inevitably ends up controlling the deal – which erodes trust and defeats the purpose.

The most natural place to build that neutral infrastructure is at the point where money changes hands – which is exactly what Creem and Mozaic are doing. Revenue-sharing starts there. Profit-sharing (after costs) is a natural extension, and likely inevitable.

These platforms can also be built at a company-internal level – for more effective incentive structures with employees and freelancers. Or extended to users themselves, rewarding them for contributing to a product's growth: attracting new users, bringing in customers, helping develop the product. That's the space KOOS ([related review](/review/kak-dobitsja-uspeha-samomu)) has been building in, having raised $4.6M – still alive, though its last round was in 2022.