The influencer marketing game is gaining a new, AI-powered platform helmed by some veterans of industry.
Called Kin, the platform harnesses large language models (LLMs) to help beauty and wellness brands create and maximize influencer relationships at scale. Its five founding team members hail from Tribe Dynamics, the influencer marketing firm that launched in 2012 and played a key role in popularizing earned media value (EMV) as a creator metric, and was in 2021 acquired by CreatorIQ.
“Our sweet spot is trust, agility, being AI-native, and the fact that we can build quickly with a bench of smart, sophisticated brands to solve an evolving set of needs in real time,” said Brit Starr, president of Kin. So far the company has worked with brands including Tower 28, Cocokind and Troye Sivan’s Tsu Lang Yor.
Starr’s cofounders at Kin include chief executive officer Ryan Lee; chief technology officer Henry Chen; Conor Begley, and Jon Namnath.
Conor Begley and Jonathan Namnath
Courtesy
“Every 10 to 15 years, some big shift happens in the software industry, and there’s an opportunity to kind of recreate the thing from the ground up,” said Begley, who is also a user of Kin via his clean beer brand Fathers Brewing. “Ultimately the job of the tool is to facilitate creator relationships and strengthen them over time while reducing the amount of administrative work that’s associated with those relationships.
“You can think about it as, ‘OK — I’ve got 500 influencers talking about me. How are they doing? What’s the health of those influencers? Who should I be reaching out to? Who had some really cool milestone or birthday?’”
In addition to helping brands facilitate relationships with their own communities, Kin aims to help companies understand their social performance relative to that of their competitors. “Actionability is built into everything; it’s not just about what you need to know and contextual insights, but what you can do with them,” said Starr.
Data from Grand View Research shows the creator economy was valued at $252 billion in 2025, and is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2033. Kin joins tools like Traackr, Launchmetrics, Odore, Nectar Social and, of course, CreatorIQ, in the growing realm of influencer marketing platforms.
“We’ve worked together, and so we all have context in terms of why we’re here, who we are doing this in service of, and how we operate in terms of that curiosity-first approach,” said Starr. “We’re excited to start shaping the future of what influencer marketing can be with AI behind it.”
