Rachel Knepp thinks her Nashville-based fintech startup can do split payments better. Visa is betting her company can too.
Knepp won the LGBTQ+ category in Visa’s Everywhere Initiative pitch competition which sought to invest in and partner with founders from three underrepresented groups — Blacks, Women and LGBTQ+. Her winnings included $10,000 in funding and a strategic partnership with the credit card giant.
“This partnership with Visa will allow us to provide instant payouts to our users and provide card issuance,” Knepp says.
Mozaic, formerly known as Jammber, was founded seven years ago by local serial entrepreneur Marcus Cobb in an effort to make splitting commissions and royalties amongst co-creators easier. Knepp became a co-founder of the company when it rebranded as Mozaic last year.
“Most music deals involve a flat fee and royalties to artists, producers and songwriters,” Knepp explains. “However, there wasn’t one platform or system to automate all those payments.”
Payment splits relied on the honor system and involved multiple processes causing payment delays and extra fees.
“When it comes to music, it’s always been easy to create together but very hard to get paid together,” Cobb says.
Knepp and Cobb engineered Jammber — an easy to use mobile app that allowed for seamless, automated, inexpensive splits for music industry professionals. From 2015 to 2020, Jammber’s platform facilitated splits for musical creators across more than 200 countries using 135 currencies.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, streaming services boomed, global collaborations increased, and creators found new ways to diversify their revenue streams, not just in music, but across all creative mediums — podcasting, video gaming, eCommerce, collaborative gig work, etc. 50 million creators — musicians, artists, writers, graphic designers — across the globe co-created more than $104 billion of projects.
More collaborations meant more payment splits and the demand for Jammber’s platform skyrocketed.
“The pandemic showed us the utility of our technology across the entire creator economy — not just the music industry,” Knepp explains. “We saw need and opportunity and with that Mozaic was born.”
The company rebranded, adapted its technology to better serve creatives across all industries.
“Renaming Jammber to Mozaic represented serving the entire Creator Economy beyond music, as a global fintech company,” Knepp says.
With Mozaic’s multi-wallet approach, users can automatically send and receive payments with collaborators across the globe via fiat or crypto, create smart contracts, and view earnings from multiple revenue streams in one place.
“Our mission still remains the same – to put more time and money into the lives of creators and be the premier payment platform for the world’s co-creation economy,” Knepp says.