The platform that turned creators into millionaires is looking for new investment — and deserves more credit than it gets
In news that will surprise exactly nobody who has been paying attention to where the internet’s money actually goes, OnlyFans — the platform the mainstream tech press spent years condescending to — is in talks to sell about a 20% stake to San Francisco investment firm Architect Capital. The deal would value the company at more than $3 billion. For context, that’s more than Twitter was worth for most of its existence, and OnlyFans has never once had to beg advertisers to take it seriously. It found a better way.
The timing carries some weight. The deal comes just weeks after Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-born entrepreneur who purchased OnlyFans in 2018 and quietly transformed it into one of the most creator-friendly platforms on the internet, died of cancer at 43. He was famously reclusive, gave almost no interviews, had barely any public photos, and somehow managed to stay one of the least visible billionaires alive while making nearly $2 million per day from the platform in 2024. Whatever you think of the content OnlyFans hosts, Radvinsky built something that worked, and worked spectacularly, on terms that actually benefited the people producing the content. That’s rarer than it sounds.
OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of creator earnings. Instagram takes 100% of the attention and gives creators a follower count and a prayer. YouTube’s ad revenue share has been a subject of creator grievance for fifteen years. OnlyFans, for all its cultural baggage, built a model where the people doing the work got paid directly by the people who wanted to see it, with minimal algorithmic interference and no brand safety department deciding whose content was acceptable. It is, structurally, one of the most straightforward creator economy platforms ever built. And it got there before “creator economy” was even a phrase people used at conferences.
The numbers are hard to argue with. Spending on the platform hit $7.2 billion in 2024. The platform grew from 13 million users in 2019 to 188 million by 2021, a surge driven in large part by the pandemic when millions of creators, suddenly without their usual income streams, turned to OnlyFans and actually found a reliable one. That’s not an accident or a fluke. That’s a platform delivering on its promise at exactly the moment people needed it to.
Now, with Radvinsky gone, OnlyFans is navigating a transition that would be complicated for any company and is particularly complicated for this one. The Architect Capital deal, which will be a minority stake, could close as early as next month and would reportedly bring new financial services and products for creators. And here is where the story gets genuinely interesting, because this is a real and longstanding problem OnlyFans creators face.
Many of them can’t get basic banking services. Payment processors have historically treated adult content creators like financial pariahs, leaving people with six-figure incomes unable to get a mortgage or a business account. If Architect Capital’s financial services background translates into actual infrastructure that helps creators manage and access their earnings like normal human beings, that would be a meaningful improvement in the lives of a lot of people the traditional financial system has spent years pretending don’t exist.
This is not OnlyFans’ first attempt at a sale. Reuters reported in May 2025 that the company had been in talks with LA-based Forest Road Company at an $8 billion valuation. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported Architect Capital was eyeing a majority stake at $5.5 billion. Now we’re at a minority stake and $3 billion. The number has drifted downward, which is either a sign of a cooling market for private tech assets generally or a reflection of the unique friction that comes with selling a business that makes squeamish investors reach for their pearls. Probably some of both.
OnlyFans has not been without its stumbles. The platform’s 2021 announcement that it would ban explicit content (which was swiftly reversed after an eruption of entirely justified creator fury) remains the clearest example of what happens when a platform forgets who built it. The reversal was the right call, and OnlyFans made it quickly. Age verification has been an ongoing challenge, and one the platform has faced regulatory and legal pressure over. These are real issues that deserve real solutions.
But the core of what OnlyFans built — a direct payment platform that lets creators control their content and their pricing and their relationship with their audience — is genuinely good. It gave economic agency to a category of creator who every other platform had either exploited or excluded. It made people real money. It treated the transaction honestly, which is more than most of Silicon Valley can say.
Radvinsky built something worth several billion dollars while saying very little about it publicly. There’s a version of this story where that’s suspicious. There’s also a version where a man simply built a product that worked, paid the people who used it, and let the results speak for themselves.
The results, as it turns out, are pretty loud.
