If you have a smartphone, there’s probably troves of video data lying dormant in your camera roll. Montréal-based GridBank wants to turn that data into passive income for users, and a 2026-ready marketing strategy for brands.
“Everybody in the world has videos sitting on their phone. How on earth has no one built an economy or an infrastructure around this asset?”
Laura Lalonde, GridBank
While working in performance marketing, where part of her job was to test what kind of content encouraged the most clicks, GridBank founder and CEO Laura Lalonde noticed a frustrating irony: the videos that cost the least to make—that didn’t look like staged content—consistently outperformed other forms of content.
“Everybody in the world has videos sitting on their phone,” Lalonde told BetaKit in an interview. “How on earth has no one built an economy or an infrastructure around this asset?”
She asked friends and family to upload videos they had sitting in their camera roll to her Google Drive, but that wasn’t enough content. GridBank was her solution. The app, which launched in 2023, allows anyone to upload user-generated videos to a marketplace, where ad agencies and enterprises pay to use the videos for a more organic-feeling, social media strategy.
Users can upload short clips of a part of their day—a step-by-step skincare routine or a sunset on vacation—that aren’t tied to a product or a brand. Ad agencies or brands that pay for the content can then use it in their marketing materials, with their logo. Lalonde argues that the value here is in the videos’ authenticity, rather than their proximity to a brand.
“By using footage that is completely unstaged where you’re just filming things out of joy, you actually adopt a media language that is even closer to the watcher,” she said.
In return, GridBank pays users for uploading and selling short video clips. Users must consent to having their video data used by GridBank’s enterprise customers, which can then use the clips in their own marketing materials. It’s free to sign up, but earnings can only be cashed out once you hit $10. Lalonde said the platform is seeing tens of thousands of uploads per month now, with some creators bringing in a few hundred dollars per month.
In mid-March, GridBank closed a $6-million equity seed round, led by StandUp Ventures, Version One Ventures, and GreenSky Ventures, with participation from AQC Capital and its associated angel network, Anges Québec. Lalonde said the round included $1 million of secondary for some friends and family investors who had contributed around $500,000 total. She claimed the company was profitable before it hit the market for venture dollars.
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“Laura saw before most that every person with a phone is sitting on untapped assets with real economic value,” StandUp Ventures senior associate Katheleen Eva said in a statement. “Gridbank gives consumer data a price tag for the first time.”
GridBank’s customers include TubeScience, a California-based creative video advertising firm, as well as the in-house team at rideshare company Lyft. Lalonde said the funding will help expand her 12-person team, particularly in machine learning and growth roles. The company also plans to launch an external application programming interface (API) to connect its videos to other enterprise apps, as well as a Pokémon Go-style campaign in the fall to encourage more users to upload content from specific locations.
But unlike Pokémon Go, which was eventually revealed to have been collecting hordes of user location and 3D movement data without users’ explicit knowledge, users are actively signing up to sell their data. The problem in Lalonde’s eyes wasn’t the market for this kind of data itself, but rather that users didn’t have the option to make money from it.
“If we’re going to build something that requires a mass amount of consumer data, consumers should be able to have transparency and benefit from that as well,” Lalonde said.
Another murky part of user-generated content is consent. What happens if you find yourself in the background of a stranger’s video, which they then upload to GridBank?
Lalonde says that’s where her team’s guardrails and moderation rules come in. For example, it doesn’t accept uploads of videos featuring other people’s likenesses. It uses humans on the team (including Lalonde) to review and approve uploaded videos. Though there is some automation, Lalonde is “not fully convinced that it’s a good idea to completely remove someone’s eyes from the process.”
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo courtesy Aaron Burden.