Co-CEOs Ian Shepherd and Owen Maher think they’ve found an answer to the problem that’s long kept institutional investors wary of acquiring brands in the $250 billion creator economy: turning volatile personality-driven brands into sustainable media businesses. Their startup, London-based Electrify Video Partners, buys majority equity stakes in established independent YouTube channels which it calls creator-founder knowledge brands. It then provides capital and operational support to scale them. The company has grown rapidly since its 2021 founding, adding at least nine flagship YouTube channels to its portfolio. Its largest media property, Veritasium, whose channel posts science oriented videos like “How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet” boasts 21 million subscribers and over four billion views.
According to PitchBook, The company has attracted roughly $185 million from private equity firms including London’s Capital D and New York City’s Equable Capital and MEP Capital, on the bet that these brands can have a life beyond their original creators. While advertisers keep flocking to influencers—Forbes’ top 50 creators earned a collective $1 billion in 2026—investors worry that these brands are too dependent on the personality in front of the camera. Maher and Shepherd think the solution lies in less flashy categories of channels and building well-staffed production and development teams.
Electrify seeks out Youtube channels that are established leaders in a certain niche, be it coding, aviation or Lego. They are particularly drawn to brands that produce videos that “inform and inspire.” In other words, mini documentaries tailor-made for Millennials and Generation Z who are curious but have short attention spans.
“There’s lots of viral trend-led sugar rush type content and we really want to focus on thoughtful informative content that has a positive place in the world,” says Shepherd, who believes the documentary-oriented channels it backs have an “evergreen” value that’s more stable than news or viral content.
“A video about Pluto or about black holes is just as relevant in five years as it is today,” says Shepherd. Electrify’s goals are high. Board chairman and former YouTube exec Timothy Shey sees the video channel roll up as the Condé Nast of the creator economy, where every brand in the portfolio is somebody’s favorite.
“Institutional investors are starting to really quickly wake up to this,” insists Shey.
The spark that created Electrify occurred around 2016, when Shepherd, who headed business development at Disney, saw the media industry shift in real time. Shepherd was charged with building out Disney’s YouTube-based multi-channel network, Maker Studios, and saw that young people, including Shepherd’s then eight-year-old daughter, were turning away from traditional television programming.
“She really wanted to watch our YouTube creators and not the Disney shows that the TV channels were producing,” says Shepherd.
After Shepherd left Disney in 2018, he launched a startup called The Social Store, aimed at helping the U.K.’s biggest YouTubers build franchises, host events and sell products. Then in 2021, he got a LinkedIn message from Maher and Justin Reizes, the other founders of Electrify.
Maher and Reizes were longtime investors who had worked together at KKR and structured investments in some media assets, but none tied to the creator economy. Maher had seen that “eyeballs and advertising dollars following those eyeballs” were shifting toward digital media. The pair identified Shepherd as someone who had expertise and connections in the creator space, and reached out. On August 18, 2021, the trio teamed up to start Electrify.
Electrify’s biggest acquisition to date is Veritasium, a YouTube channel with 21 million subscribers created in 2010 by Derek Muller, an Australian-born PhD in Physics Education Research. Veritasium takes niche science topics like material science and particle physics and presents them with the production value and storytelling of a network documentary. Think a deep-dive into aerogel, the world’s lightest solid, with 60 million views, and a related 12 minute video “I Waterproofed Myself With Aerogel!” or a 30-minute documentary about why it is almost impossible to make blue LEDs.
Youtube creator Derek Muller, founder of science-focused Veritasium, sold control to Electrify in 2023 but viewership has continued to soar. (Photo by Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize )
Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
In late 2025, two years after the acquisition, Veritasium’s Muller posted a video announcing the partnership, which according to U.K, disclosures gave Electrify 80% ownership. In it, he said he was attracted to this arrangement, thinking it would allow him to step away from some of the operational responsibilities of running a major YouTube brand.
“I never wanted to deal with hiring, and taxes, and all that stuff,” said Muller, 43. “I just wanted to make videos.”
He also noted that since the 2023 investment, subscriber counts had increased and the channel was able to make more ambitious, longer-form content, due to Electrify’s funding and commitment to scale production.
Veritasium’s payroll has grown eight-fold—from four to 34—since it was acquired in 2023. Electrify also scouts new revenue sources for their brands beyond the sponsorship deals and programmatic advertising that typically drive YouTube earnings. Veritasium released a tabletop game called Elements of Truth in 2025 that did over $1 million in sales on Kickstarter in the first week.
In his video, Muller also announced that he would spend more time away from the channel, and may appear less, or not at all, in future videos. Separating the creator from the channel addresses investors’ biggest concern: key-person risk, or the worry that the success of the brand is too tied to one individual. This concern could explain why investors have been hesitant to buy existing brands in the creator economy, which Goldman Sachs estimates could grow to half a trillion dollars by 2027.
“Whatever the creator does—if they get hit by a bus or decide to do something else—we could be very vulnerable to that,” says Stephan Lobmeyr, Electrify’s lead investor from Capital D.
Electrify’s first buyout in 2021 was Astrum, an astronomy-focused channel founded by Alex McColgan, who has been running the channel since 2013. Creator McColgan has since stepped back from the day-to-day operations of the channel. Video ideas, which might include an hour-long deep dive into NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, are thought up by the channel’s development team, written and edited by freelancers and reviewed by fact-checkers. McColgan still narrates the videos and offers feedback on the scripts, but avoids much of the production and development. Last year, Electrify brought in television documentary veteran Jess Jordan to run Astrum, which has 2.85 million subscribers and almost 600 million views.
While Electrify refuses to discuss the specifics of its financial results, according to the latest UK government filings, Electrify’s revenue grew five-fold over the past two years, reaching $30 million in 2025. Electrify is financed with both private equity, led by $85 million from Capital D, and a debt facility. It now says it employs more than 120 people across its portfolio brands. According to UK disclosures the company finished 2025 in the red as interest payments on $40 million in debt nearly tripled.
“I think these are absolutely necessary investments,” lead investor Lobmeyr says. “If you want to scale these channels and make them more viable over the long term, you need to broaden the skill set within a channel.”
The market for acquiring and scaling creator-owned brands remains thin, but there have been a few high profile deals. In 2021, former Disney employees and their Blackstone-backed Candle Media bought the company behind Cocomelon, the animated children’s YouTube channel with 200 million subscribers and more than two thousand videos, for $3 billion. That same year, Miami’s Recurrent Ventures acquired the automobile-focused Donut Media brand. Several of Donut’s hosts later left citing creative disagreements with the company’s management.
“There aren’t too many businesses that are specifically doing what we are doing, which is buying these assets and working alongside the creators,”says Shepherd.
Private equity-backed outside investment in creator brands has met some resistance from creators and audiences. YouTuber Gen Kimura, whose recent video about private equity turning YouTube into “slop” got 4.7 million views, said he would not accept an offer from Electrify were one extended, citing concerns about creative independence.
“At the end of the day, it is a business decision for them [acquisition companies] and they want to recoup that investment,” says Kimura. “Creating videos on more controversial topics wouldn’t really fly with that.” Given that Kimura’s channel, which has only 784,000 subscribers, specializes in exposing corruption, is not likely on any institution’s acquisition target list.
While Electrify maintains that its video influencers retain creative control, the firm’s collection of portfolio companies is designed to lure in premium sponsorships. Executives and investors highlight that Electrify’s content is “brand-safe.”
“This is a category where sponsors know what they’re getting, they understand the mission, and they understand what a channel’s about,” says Shey. “An advertiser is going to be a lot more likely to want to do a multi-month, multi-year commitment to channels like ours because they’ve got a proven track record and they know what they’re partnering with.”