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Victor Trindade, the Eagle, founded FlyMedia to create characters that function as influencers without relying on human faces, and the startup raised R$ 20 million in a round led by OneVC with participation from global funds
The Rio native Victor Trindade, known on the internet as Eagle, was 15 years old when he realized that an audience could become a business, and at 28 he leads FlyMedia, a startup that creates digital influencers made with artificial intelligence, according to Exame, in a report from July 6th. In 9 months of operation, the company’s characters have accumulated 1.2 billion views and 3.7 million followers.
The project was born with a strong cash position: FlyMedia raised R$ 20 million in a round led by OneVC, with participation from global funds such as Alter Global, A16z Scout Fund, Norte, Hypersphere, Verve, and FJ Labs, as well as investor Fersen Lambranho, chairman of GP Investments, according to Forbes, which reported the investment in December 2025. The declared ambition is not modest: to create the “new Disney” of social networks.
The click at 15: the Minecraft server that crashed from so many fans
The first business lesson came from the world’s best-selling game. In 2013, the Minecraft gameplay channel that Trindade maintained with his cousin had about 20,000 subscribers, but the community was so loyal that the private server launched by the two crashed due to excessive demand, and when they started charging VIP subscriptions, each teenage partner was making R$ 8,000 per month, according to Exame.
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“That’s where it finally clicked. We didn’t have the sense that we could make money from the internet,” recalls Trindade in the interview. The channel, called Neagle, later migrated to vlogs with his cousin Gabriel, the Neox, and became a phenomenon.
From 500,000 to 1.2 million subscribers in one month, and goodbye college
The explosion came in the United States. In 2016, when the cousins were living in Florida to study at Full Sail University, a university specialized in the entertainment industry, the channel jumped from 500,000 to 1.2 million subscribers in a single month, and Trindade dropped out of college in the 3rd month of the course, according to Exame.
There were 4 years of daily videos, shared houses with other creators, and a routine that mixed entertainment and entrepreneurship. In parallel, he and his partners created businesses to monetize their own audience: geek store, Minecraft server, theater tours, book, and an agency to help other influencers structure careers, still according to Exame.
The bank that was born from the channel and became a reference for Generation Z
The biggest bet outside of content was financial. The fintech that started as “Neagle Bank,” linked to the channel, had 60,000 downloads in 2 days, then became NG.CASH, raised investment, and gained its own life, with Trindade now acting as an advisor, without an executive role, according to Exame. Forbes describes NG.CASH as the leading fintech for Generation Z in Latin America and notes that the co-founder of FlyMedia is precisely Mario Augusto, CEO of NG.CASH.
“After ten years trying to find a product bigger than our brand, the final click happened. This is a generational pain, it’s not about our channel’s audience,” Trindade tells Exame about the creation of the bank. Adding up channels and projects, Forbes reports that the entrepreneur accumulates 23 million followers and more than 5 billion views.
The factory: 7 characters, from football to gorilla podcast
The cast of FlyMedia seems straight out of a cartoon. The startup has 7 AI influencers in operation, including Zuka, linked to the football universe, who reached 500,000 followers in 40 days without paid media, Malu Sinistra, a character from a vertical novel, Gorila Cast, a podcast conducted by gorillas, Plexus, an alien with acid humor, Foka Fofoca, who surpassed 60,000 followers on Instagram in 2 months following Big Brother Brazil, and Bob and Dave, a longer-term bet with the ambition to reach streaming, according to Exame.
Behind the puppets, there is a method: the company develops an internal platform, the Fly Studio, where the flow goes from script to storyboard and to the final video, and the performance of each content feeds a kind of DNA of each character. “When you arrive at our platform, it already has the whole context. It already knows the names of the characters, the universe, and the type of humor,” Trindade explains to Exame. Each influencer is operated by a lead creator, with teams of 1 to 3 people.
The inspiration is not TikTok, it’s Disney
The business reference comes from classic studios. “When Disney builds a Cinderella, builds Mickey Mouse, these characters are the creative talent of the people who built them, but they are independent of the reputational and motivational risk of a person,” Trindade tells Exame. “There’s a game of creating influencers, but without relying on a human influencer.”
FlyMedia could have followed the more obvious path, selling custom characters for brands, but Trindade rejected the model, understanding that creating avatars for third parties would put a ceiling on the business, according to Exame. “The vision of creating a new Disney doesn’t come from within a brand,” he states. To Forbes, he summarized the target: “Our goal is to create and operate the largest IPs in the world, all conceived from the start to be global, automated, multiplatform, and driven by technology.”
How a virtual puppet pays the bills
The money comes in through four doors. The revenue model includes platform monetization, like AdSense, which already covers the production cost of some channels, advertising, licensing, and, in the area considered to have the greatest potential, proprietary products, according to Exame. The first conversion case presented by the company was the character Malu Sinistra: in an action with an affiliate link for a piece of clothing, she generated more than 26,000 clicks and over R$ 8,000 in sales.
“With AI, products will become increasingly easier to build. The big differentiator will be who has distribution,” Trindade states in the report. The backdrop helps: the creator economy could reach US$ 480 billion in 2027, compared to about US$ 250 billion in 2023, and the global market for virtual influencers is expected to grow from US$ 11.22 billion in 2025 to US$ 15.9 billion in 2026, according to projections published by Exame. Abroad, characters like Lil Miquela have already starred in international brand campaigns, and in Brazil, Lu from Magalu showed how a digital face becomes a long-term brand asset, a sign that FlyMedia’s AI influencers are arriving in an already prepared field.
The other owner phenomenon: the “1 vs. 30” of Canal Foco
While running FlyMedia, Trindade also co-founded Canal Foco, one of the recent phenomena on Brazilian YouTube. The channel gained notoriety with the debates of the “1 vs. 30” series, which put a personality face to face with 30 people of differing opinions, and episodes like the one with businessman Flávio Augusto against 30 workers and Tallis Gomes against 30 laid-off employees have accumulated millions of views, according to Exame.
The format has become one of the platform’s main bets for debate content in the country, and it shows the same instinct that guides the character factory: finding the format that captures attention before competitors.
The next step: United States and the acid test
The plan now is to cross the border. Trindade lived 9 years in the United States, wants to return to the country, and FlyMedia is already born with the ambition to create multilingual characters capable of speaking English and competing for a global audience, according to Exame. “The next generation of media will be formed by influencers and characters that are already born digital, multilingual, and technology-oriented,” says the founder.
Exame itself notes the pending challenge: the startup has audience, investment, and initial cases of conversion, but it needs to prove that the characters can sustain communities for years, and not just ride the curiosity around artificial intelligence. Here’s the observation from this newsroom, duly noted: the boy who crashed a Minecraft server due to too many fans has spent his entire life repeating the same move, turning attention into business, and now he tries to do this without even needing people in front of the camera.
From a teenager’s room to a R$ 20 million investment, Eagle’s story shows that the new generation of Brazilian entrepreneurs was born inside YouTube.
Tell us in the comments: would you follow an influencer that doesn’t exist, or for you, true charisma only comes from flesh-and-blood people?
