TheChek News Flow

Streaming platform used by sex workers has 5mn creator accounts according to latest annual results

OnlyFans paid out more than $700mn in dividends to its owner before his death earlier this year, according to annual accounts for the British streaming platform to be filed in the UK this week.

Results for Fenix International — which owns the UK-based streaming platform used by sex workers — show revenue increasing a tenth to $1.6bn in the year to November 2025, and pre-tax profit up 5 per cent to $715mn. The business, which is highly cash-generative, employs only 47 people.

The majority of profits in its 2025 accounts went in dividends to its owner, Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky, who died from cancer in the spring. His death preceded the sale of a 16 per cent stake in the business to San Francisco-based private equity firm Architect Capital in April for $535mn, giving the company a $3.2bn valuation.

The company’s accounts show $535mn was paid to Radvinsky in dividends in its 2025 financial year, up from $497mn the year before. However, a further $174mn was paid in several tranches since the end of the financial year, according to the accounts.

The sale valuation was seen as low for such a profitable company by some Wall Street advisers, explained by reluctance among investors to be involved in a business that has become notorious for connecting porn performers directly with paying fans. 

In 2025, the total number of OnlyFans creator accounts grew 9 per cent to 5mn, with the number of fan accounts increasing 16 per cent to 437mn globally. 

Of the 5mn creator accounts, 2.5mn were classed as “active”, having been used in the financial year to November 30 2025, while there were 132mn active fan accounts.

About $6.2bn was paid out to its creators last year — after OnlyFans took its 20 per cent cut of their proceeds. The overall amount paid to creators now totals $30bn since the platform was established in 2016. 

The site also hosts other creators such as actors, musicians and sports stars seeking to generate money directly from fans, often in exchange for accepting requests for specific types of content. 

The accounts — which will be filed this week in Companies House — confirm that the group is now controlled by the family trust led by Katie Chudnovsky, Radvinsky’s widow. 

OnlyFans is marking its tenth anniversary, having been set up in 2016 by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely and his father, Guy, and then sold in 2018 to Radvinsky. It remains based in the UK. 

Keily Blair, chief executive of OnlyFans, said: “In the 10 years since the platform launched in 2016, OnlyFans has paid out over $30bn to creators around the world, including over $1mn to more than 5,000 creators. As a UK-based business, we have also made a significant contribution to the UK economy, paying over £600mn in corporate taxes from 2016 to date.”

The group’s largest market is the US, where it generated $965mn of revenue in its last financial year. The UK and Europe contributed $347mn and the rest of the world $241mn.

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Oura, the smart ring maker, with offices in San Francisco and Finland, is reportedly planning to raise up to $3 billion as soon as next month in a U.S. IPO that values the more than 900-person company at [spits out coffee] north of $16 billion, according to Bloomberg. The outlet adds that investors are expected to sell a major chunk of stock in the offering.

A $16 billion valuation would mark an enormous jump from the $10.9 billion valuation Oura was assigned last September, when it closed an $875 million Series E round backed by Fidelity, ICONIQ, Whale Rock, and Atreides, joining earlier backers like Dexcom, The Chernin Group, Forerunner Ventures, Coatue, and Temasek.

The wearables space has gotten crowded fast.

Samsung launched its own ring, the Galaxy Ring, two years ago. But Oura’s most direct rival may be the fitness band maker Whoop, which has undergone its own reinvention. Once a performance tool for elite athletes and young men, Whoop has spent the past year courting a much broader audience, layering in hormone tracking and blood-panel testing for perimenopause and thyroid health. The move drove its own valuation up to $10 billion back in March. Oura has followed a similar path, evolving from its starting niche of biohacking CEOs into a more mainstream sleep-and-recovery brand.

Oura announced in May that it had filed confidentially for an IPO.

The company has said that it generated $500 million in revenue in 2024, roughly $1 billion in 2025, and that it expected to generate close to $2 billion in revenue in 2026, though we’ll learn much more once its S-1 filing becomes publicly available.

Not all of Oura’s recent attention has been positive. A proposed class action lawsuit filed last week in San Francisco is accusing Oura of misleading consumers about the accuracy of its sleep tracking features. Among other complaints in the filing, Oura is accused of not just claiming “to measure a heartbeat or a temperature, but the exact stage of sleep the wearer is in—which in reality requires electrodes in the scalp and sensors on the eyes, as only a hospital or other clinical setting can do.”

In a statement to TechCrunch sent over the weekend, a spokesperson pushed back against claims in that suit, saying the company plans to “defend against them in the appropriate legal forum” and that “[w]hile Oura Ring is not a medical device or a substitute for a clinical sleep study, Oura’s sleep staging has been validated and compared favorably in multiple studies against polysomnography, the gold standard.” The statement continued on to say that “[m]ultiple third-party, independent studies support our claims of accuracy and we have transparently reported on the mechanisms and measures that inform Oura’s sleep staging.”

Don’t call us ‘nuclear’, say nuclear fusion start-ups

Companies set to enjoy lighter US regulatory regime by avoiding words associated with conventional nuclear plants

For fusion start-ups, one of the industry’s biggest breakthroughs may have come not in physics but in branding.

Years of efforts to distance themselves from conventional nuclear power are beginning to pay off as US regulators prepare rules that would separate fusion and place it under a lighter licensing regime.

The industry’s best-funded companies and leading trade groups avoid the use of terms such as “nuclear” and even “reactor”, arguing that they wrongly evoke the risks associated with conventional nuclear power. “Smart marketing” as one veteran fusion investor put it.

The debate comes as billions of dollars pour into fusion, which seeks to replicate the process that powers the sun by fusing atomic nuclei rather than splitting atoms, as in conventional nuclear power plants.

More than 50 start-ups are racing to commercialise the technology, with Google and Microsoft among those backing companies in the hope of securing abundant clean energy for power-hungry AI.

A US government laboratory has demonstrated that a so-called net energy gain is possible through fusion, but no company has yet proved it can build a commercially viable power plant.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems was among the earliest companies to deliberately distance fusion from the language of nuclear power, according to executives and industry watchers. The US company is one of the sector’s biggest players, with about $4bn in funding and backing from Google.

Bob Mumgaard, chief executive, said the debate over whether to describe fusion as “nuclear” began about a decade ago. Fusion should “stand on its own” and be “judged on its merits”, rather than be defined by a term that “carries the good and bad” of the nuclear industry, he said.

Helion Energy, backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, similarly argues that “the common perceptions of ‘nuclear power’ do not apply to fusion” and refers to its machines as “generators” rather than reactors.

Some executives dismiss the term “reactor” altogether, saying it has little meaning outside engineering.

“Beer is technically made in a reactor,” one executive said. “Most people aren’t nuclear physicists.”

Fusion joins atomic nuclei rather than splitting them as conventional nuclear plants do, known as fission. Although both are technically nuclear reactions, fusion cannot sustain the runaway chain reaction that characterises fission. 

The proposed rules by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would regulate fusion facilities more like particle accelerators than nuclear plants, allowing many projects to fall under state rather than federal oversight.

That could give fusion companies an advantage as states compete to become the first “fusion state” by offering streamlined permits.

Christina England-Livengood, a partner at White & Case and a former NRC lawyer who helped develop the regulatory framework for Congress in 2023, said the industry’s advocacy “definitely” influenced the policy discussion as the commission considered a separate regulatory pathway for fusion.

That decision laid the foundation for the rules now being finalised, she said, adding that industry input helped regulators “see the rest of the picture” at an agency that had traditionally been “very closed”. 

The Fusion Industry Association, which was one of the leading voices advocating for a separation of fusion from conventional nuclear power regulations, also makes “conscious decisions” to avoid the use of the term “nuclear” and “reactor”, said Andrew Holland, its chief executive.

The distinction is crucial for fusion companies, which have attracted more than $11.5bn in private funding to date, according to PitchBook, and are racing to connect commercial power plants to the grid. It could spare them the lengthy licensing process designed for nuclear fission reactors.

The industry’s argument rests on technical differences. Fusion systems still use radioactive fuels such as tritium, and structural materials become radioactive after prolonged neutron exposure. Even so, the International Atomic Energy Agency describes fusion as “inherently safe” because the reaction cannot sustain a runaway chain reaction. 

Fuels such as tritium have a half-life of 12.3 years and are generally far easier to manage than many radioactive materials produced by fission reactors, some of which remain hazardous for millions of years.

Colin McNally, a fusion physicist, argued that, despite tritium’s relatively short half-life, the need for an on-site inventory would inevitably become a political issue as companies sought to build larger power plants.

“There’s a difference between poisoning the landscape for 20,000 years and causing people damage for 10 years,” he said, adding that harming people for a decade was still bad.

CFS chief executive Mumgaard was steadfast. “Fusion deserves to be its own thing,” he said. “So we should make language that highlights that.”