Content-creation-economy company Patreon has acquired a tech recruiting firm as it readies a hiring push.

The company, which was founded in 2013, helped pioneer the growth of a subset of the gig economy, the creator economy. Their platform has become a go-to way for creatives to earn money from their audiences without the need for a middle-company.

By acqui-hiring a tech recruiting firm, Clear Talent, the company take their recruiting team from 10 to 50 people - a serious increase, which reflects on an extremely competitive talent market. Clear Talent Chief Executive Rockman Ha will become Patreon's head of talent acquisition.

In April, Patreon announced that it had raised a Series F financing round of $155 million, bringing the company’s total valuation to $4 billion. Patreon also announced a string of new executive hires with the appointment of Julian Gutman as Chief Product Officer (formerly of Instagram), Tiffany Stevenson as Chief People Officer (formerly of Box), and most recently, Utkarsh Stravistava as Senior VP of Engineering (formerly of Google). On the product side, Patreon this year launched support for a wave of new languages and currencies, along with updates to creators’ income dashboards. In the months ahead, Patreon has plans to expand its platform capabilities on desktop and mobile, increase international offerings, and create new content consumption tools.

“Clear Talent brings an impressive track record of recruiting top technical talent along with strong alignment with Patreon’s core company values,″ said Stevenson. “With an ambitious roadmap of new features ahead for our creators and their members, we’re excited to welcome Clear Talent as we significantly grow our teams and continue the work to champion all creators.”

The hiring push will be focused on growing the engineering and product teams with the goal of expanding beyond content memberships to include other money-making features for creators such as ecommerce sales.

Other plans include allowing users to customize the look of their Patreon page and increasing the community interaction among a creator's fan base on Patreon.

By investing in talent and accelerating product launches, some of which are expected to roll out later this year, Patreon hopes to double the total amount earned by its creators each month to $200 million, Gutman said. "We're in a growth phase," he said. "We need to build a much bigger team than we have right now."

The company also hopes to expand from almost 300 employees to 500 "pretty quickly," he added.

“Having spent years focused on aligning exceptional people with the right opportunities, it is rare to come across companies as unique and mission-driven as Patreon,” added Ha. “We are deeply inspired by the passionate team behind Patreon’s mission and look forward to joining the cause and building a world-class technical team.”

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