The news: Later has quietly evolved from a scheduling tool into a major performance engine in creator commerce. Nearly one year after acquiring influencer platform Mavely, the combined business is now processing more than $2.4 billion in annualized gross merchandise value and has passed $250 million in total payouts to creators.

• Over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend alone, creator-led content running through Later and Mavely helped generate about $50 million in sales, with everyday influencers earning $3 million in just four days.
• Later now combines link‑in‑bio and affiliate tech, a performance-driven creator network, influencer workflow software, agency-style services, and social media management into a single stack that can take campaigns from first touch through checkout.
• Enterprise brands have noticed: Southwest Airlines is among the latest big clients to plug into Later’s infrastructure, and the company was again named a leader in G2’s Winter 2026 influencer-platform reports.

From gimmick to growth engine: In an EMARKETER interview, CEO Scott Sutton said its success is proof that influencer work has matured from a side experiment into a core performance channel. Brands increasingly expect creator programs to behave like measurable growth engines rather than awareness-only plays.

• Later is betting hard on data and AI to navigate that maturation. Sutton says his team can show a CPG client every post from creators in a program, each piece of content’s cost, every click and engagement, and exact SKUs that ended up in a shopper’s cart, all attributed back to the original content.
• That feeds EdgeAI, Later’s engine trained on a decade of creator and commerce data to predict performance and optimize campaigns in flight. For creators, this is translating into real income: Sutton pointed to multiple millionaires and six‑figure earners inside the Later–Mavely ecosystem.

Why it matters: Later’s milestone is further proof that the creator economy has grown up.

• Creators themselves now behave like mini media companies, Sutton argues; they want creative control, recurring relationships, and smooth shopping experiences for their followers, and are more protective of their own reputations when choosing which brands to back.
• The market backdrop supports this shift. US creator economy ad spend is expected to more than triple from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $43.9 billion in 2026, per IAB. US social-media creators’ revenues will climb from $12.3 billion in 2023 to $23.4 billion by 2027, and US influencer marketing spend will rise from $7.4 billion in 2023 to nearly $13.7 billion in 2027, with double‑digit annual gains. Later’s scale and payouts sit squarely inside that rising tide.