Investors used to run from adult content like it was radioactive, but that’s changing. The latest proof is MintStars, a subscription platform that grew inside Harvard’s startup incubator and just did something almost nobody in this industry does: it handed its creators an actual ownership stake in the company.

MintStars was founded in 2021 by CEO Daniel Sargent, with Jessica Van Meir as cofounder and, until recently, chief operating officer. Team lead Allie Eve Knox now shares the driver’s seat with Sargent. The platform runs on roughly 10,000 creators and 32,000 subscribers, modest next to OnlyFans’ user base but still nothing ot sneeze at. It’s spent the past few years trying to position itself as the friendlier alternative in a field known for squeezing its talent. The pitch is simple: put more of the money in creators’ pockets by shifting fees and transaction costs onto subscribers instead.

Last month, MintStars went further, converting 20 percent of the company into creator-owned equity, split among creators based on how much revenue they generate, how many people they refer, and how active they are on the platform. The move traces back to 2023, when MintStars joined Harvard Innovation Labs in Boston after Van Meir enrolled in a PhD program at the Harvard Kennedy School — the same incubator that’s helped launch more than 7,000 ventures and collectively raised over $15 billion since 2011. MintStars even made it to semi-finalist status in the 2023 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge.

A chunk of that 20 percent stake came from Van Meir herself. She stepped down to lean further into her PhD, giving up her 23 percent ownership and redirecting most of it to creators, with the remaining 3 percent donated to SWOP Behind Bars, a nonprofit that advocates for sex workers and trafficking survivors. On the money side, MintStars’ backers include P2 Ventures, Escape Velocity, and AGE, a lineup that reads more like a fintech cap table than what most people picture when they hear “adult platform.” Smaller creators on the site pull in a few hundred dollars a month; the top earners clear $10,000 or more. One creator, who goes by Goddess Raena and asked to keep her legal name out of it, says the extra income has covered gas, groceries, and student loans, and she’s now saving toward a wedding venue.

Here’s why it matters beyond one platform’s press release. OnlyFans takes a 20 percent commission and concentrates most of the real money at the top — statisticsonly.fans pegs the top 1 percent of creators at roughly $49,000 a year or more. Everybody else is fighting over the scraps of a platform they don’t own a piece of, no matter how much traffic they bring in. MintStars is betting that creator equity is a real differentiator, not a PR stunt, and the kind of thing that could pull talent away from bigger platforms if it actually works.

It’s also a signal about where adult content sits in the investment world right now. A Boston University finance lecturer put it plainly: these platforms are relatively low-tech, low-maintenance businesses with strong demand, which makes them attractive even to buttoned-up VCs who’d never say the word “OnlyFans” out loud at a board meeting. Private equity bought Pornhub’s parent company. Architect Capital just took a stake in OnlyFans itself worth more than half a billion dollars. Sex work is quietly becoming just another line item on a balance sheet.

That doesn’t erase the risks. Deepfakes, piracy, and sudden platform bans still hang over every creator’s income, and researchers who work with trafficking survivors warn that success stories like Raena’s can flatten a much messier reality for people who don’t get to walk away with a wedding venue fund. But MintStars is testing a genuinely different question: what happens when the workers who generate a platform’s value also own a piece of it?

Ownership changes leverage. So does MintStars prove creators deserve a stake in the platforms they built, or is 20 percent just enough to keep them from asking for more?