Breakr Founders Discuss Innovation and Support from Us

The relationship between Breakr founders Anthony and Ameer Brown is what happens while you mix innovation, entrepreneurship, and resilience. As siblings, their love for one another runs deep, and they convey that very same admiration to their work as co-founders of a dynamic platform that connects artists, brands, and creators as they work to rework the landscape of the music industry.

As a tech company, Breakr quickly became an industry powerhouse, changing the best way music, talent, brands, and influencers are discovered and shared. Since its launch in 2020, Breakr has been connecting artists with labels and brands seeking to capitalize on the creator economy. Beyond that, Anthony says ensuring creators are paid what they’re value keeps him up at night (in the easiest way) with regards to business.

“We’ve been doing this for about three and a half years now, and you can get tired if you don’t have a reason to,” Anthony said. BLACK ENTREPRENEURSHIP. “I think our why has really crystallized over the last few weeks, which is really more like months. It’s like, Hey, we want to make it easier for brands and labels to find creators, but we also want to make it easier for brands and labels to interact and provide value to creators.”

“The most important thing is streamlining those payments. Payments was a really important innovation that we pushed at Breakr,” he continued. “We made it our business and kind of our modus operandi to pay these kids in real time. For us, that stops evictions. That stops people from having to have a job and be a creator on the side. It allows people to go out and price themselves appropriately because they know they’re going to get their money immediately.”

The company’s name comes from the beatbreaker that DJ is, and the opposite half of its name comes from the concept that the corporate desires to act as a switchboard or an off switch for the entities that use its platform, whether or not they’re creators, brands, or record labels.

“We want to be the central infrastructure,” Ameer explained. “Think about a home. All the different devices in your home are powered by electricity, but they need to be told where to go, what voltage needs to be delivered, all the information that needs to get there is transmitted through the electricity that goes to that device, so we think of Breakr as a way for the creator economy, we want all the different inputs and all the different devices to get the right information. They need the right payment. They need the right resources. They need the right performance. They need the right data that they need at the right time, and that’s basically why we’re called Breakr. We’re just a routing engine that connects people and solves problems at an efficient scale.”

As founders of Breakr and graduates of the esteemed HBCU, Florida A&M University (FAMU), the Brown brothers’ vision for the corporate got here as an “aha” moment at the identical time the world was shutting down attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Brown brothers were in a position to bring their friends along on the journey. For Anthony, working alongside his siblings was “the biggest, most stressful, amazing experience” of his life.

“We started Breakr with two other co-founders who are friends of Ameer,” he recalls. “They did a ton of events together in college. They went to FAMU, Daniel Ware and Rotimi Omosheyin, and that was the beginning. They created a whole culture from the beginning in terms of how they operated together, and I think Breakr works because from my perspective, as a technical outsider who didn’t know how they operated together, I kind of got to know them, and what they mastered together was culture. It’s a deep appreciation of culture. My background was more in finance, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, but they spent so much time in culture, curating culture, and creating culture, that it ended up being part of our DNA as a company. We really stand on the shoulders of that culture.”

Breakr’s culture itself attracted early investors like rapper-turned-entrepreneur and culture maven Nasir “Nas” Jones. Through a program called General Assembly, which each Ameer, along with his background in PR and communications, and Anthony, along with his work in tech, had access to earlier of their careers, they not only got a deeper dive into the world of digital marketing and coding, but additionally caught the eye of Nas and Queensbridge Venture Partners, this system’s early backers.

The pair had no concept that not only would they meet Nas just a few years later at Hip Hop’s fiftieth anniversary party, but that it will occur while they were fully immersed of their entrepreneurial careers, constructing Breakr from the bottom up.

“The story has come full circle for Tony and me and everything,” Ameer said. “We’re both from Queens. Our family is from Southside Jamaica Queens. Our whole story is from Queens, and Nas is basically a Queens kid, you know what I mean. So the fact that he is who he is and we know him is the coolest thing in the world.”

Anthony added, “We had the opportunity to meet him in person, tell him the whole story, take pictures, etc. It was just a great moment, a complete turnaround, to meet him as an entrepreneur who literally taught himself technology and coding through an investment he made years ago. And also for him to reinvest in our company, which was significant for us in those early days in terms of just giving us a battery in the back to keep going.”

“The opportunity to actually fund our business is just crazy. It’s a story that no one would believe if it wasn’t true,” Anthony continued. “I actually wrote it. My essay to get into the General Assembly was read and they said, ‘Why did you name your essay that?’ I was like Nas said in 2009: it meant ‘worst of the worst, coolest thing ever.’ And I thought, I want to be the greatest tech guy. I want to be able to do tech with the best of them, right? So I named the paper. And that was the thing that the person at the General Assembly who read the essay said that convinced me. She said, ‘That’s a unique approach and I think it’s a great story and I want to hire you for the program.’ So it’s a crazy story.”

In addition to being an investor, Nas is included in Breakr’s ever-evolving roster of artists using the platform. Other notables include Megan Thee Stallion, Gunna, Rick Ross, Future, and more. In addition to musicians, corporations like Meta, Live Nation, and P&G are among the many brands currently tapping the startup for various campaigns with the aforementioned artists.

With exponential growth in a brief time frame, Breakr has built a world database of 55 million creators, and the corporate is growing by the minute, employing over 70,000 creators. Looking ahead, the Brown brothers hope to succeed in over $25 million in transaction volume by the tip of next 12 months.

“I think it’s not unrealistic to see a world where we’re doing over $160 million in transactions by 2026,” Anthony said. “In fact, by 2027, we predict we’re doing somewhere around $330 million to $350 million in transactions. The North Star for me is what’s it going to take? How long is it going to take us to get to a billion dollars in payments processed per 12 months? So every strategy and all the things we do is tied to attending to that in the following five years.

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