RJ Phillips doesn’t describe ZOOP as just a social media company. To him, that would miss the point.
Social media companies build feeds. ZOOP is building something wider: an AI-powered economic system for creators, fans, brands, and communities. The platform is designed to capture real engagement, reward the people who create value, and turn verified audience behavior into intelligence that brands, creators, and partners can use.
“I operate at the intersection of capital markets, technology, and media infrastructure,” Phillips says. “My work is not focused on social media as an app category, but on how economic systems are designed, governed, and scaled in the digital age.”
This approach shapes ZOOP’s architecture. According to Phillips, ZOOP is being built as an AI-native operating system for the creator economy. Its social platform acts as the engagement layer. Its rewards model creates the incentive structure. And its AI layer, including the ZOOP Sentiment Index, turns that activity into a proprietary intelligence asset: an intelligence system that analyzes audience behavior, creator influence, community sentiment, and commercial intent using verified platform activity.
Phillips contends that standard social metrics no longer provide meaningful insights for brands or creators. Follower counts don’t indicate trust, audience segment responses, or early shifts in sentiment. Instead, ZOOP’s Sentiment Index is intended to aggregate posts, reactions, shares, comments, follows, rewards, and purchases into actionable insights that creators can use to better understand their audiences while helping brands evaluate engagement beyond surface-level metrics.
Phillips’s perspective on platform economics is grounded in experience. Earlier in his career, he helped scale a rapidly growing creator platform, giving him firsthand insight into how user behavior, platform incentives, and monetization evolve as digital ecosystems expand. That experience convinced him of how valuable behavioral data can become when paired with the right incentive structure, an idea that now informs ZOOP’s strategy.
That history also shapes how he talks about trust as a data problem, not just a brand problem. Phillips contends that bot activity, fake accounts, and unverified engagement don’t just create safety headaches—they degrade the exact signal the Sentiment Index depends on. ZOOP’s answer, he says, is to build verification and consent into the platform itself, alongside clear labeling for AI-generated content and a user-facing kill switch that lets people turn off AI-generated content.
Phillips anticipates a shift where AI agents, rather than people, will increasingly determine ad spending and creator-campaign matches. He expects brand teams to move from manual dashboard analysis to systems that directly query platform data, such as audience sentiment and campaign performance, through permissioned access. Rather than selling raw data, Phillips says ZOOP is intended to provide structured, permissioned insights generated from activity within its own ecosystem. Search and content ranking follow the same principle: ZOOP’s algorithm is being built to prioritize meaningful engagement over maximizing time spent.
That emphasis on infrastructure reflects Phillips’s career outside the technology sector. Before launching ZOOP, he spent more than a decade as Partner and Portfolio Manager at Atom Capital LLP, managing institutional fixed-income and macro strategies. He later applied that analytical background to creator platforms and technology ventures, partnering with rights holders and global media companies to develop social platforms and fan-engagement experiences around major entertainment properties. Through ii Corporation, which he co-founded and now leads as CEO, Phillips oversees ZOOP alongside Influencer Index and Sentiment Index, companies focused on behavioral analytics and engagement intelligence.
His professional background also extends beyond startups. Phillips earned an Executive MBA from Kellogg-HKUST and completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program. He is both a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment. He recently concluded a board term with the Association of International Chartered Professional Accountants alongside two U.S. Senators and currently serves as Vice Chairman of Professional Standards on CIMA’s Executive Council. Together, those finance, governance, and technology roles help explain why he tends to frame social platforms as economic systems rather than media products.
Whether the Sentiment Index becomes the differentiator Phillips describes will depend on whether ZOOP’s user base grows large enough and generates enough verified activity to produce insights that brands and creators consider valuable. Phillips acknowledges that the platform is still early in its development: ZOOP is valued at $500 million pre-launch, and its broader AI strategy ultimately depends on achieving meaningful scale.
Still, Phillips contends that the larger opportunity extends beyond launching another social platform.
“The real question for the next decade is not what technology can do,” he says. “It is who it serves.”
Written in partnership with Tom White
