Artlist

Artlist was founded in 2016 by Ira Belsky, Itzik Elbaz, Eyal Meyer, and Assaf Ayalon. Originally established in Kibbutz Afikim in northern Israel, the company now maintains its headquarters in Tel Aviv alongside its northern operations. Operating as a privately held company, Artlist is backed by notable investors including KKR and Elephant Partners. The core product is a subscription-based platform providing royalty-free digital assets—including music, sound effects, stock video, and templates—for content creators.

The primary product line revolves around unlimited subscription plans that grant creators global licenses to use high-quality music and video assets in any medium, including YouTube, commercial broadcasts, and social media. The platform targets a wide spectrum of buyers, from independent vloggers and freelance filmmakers to large enterprise marketing teams. It is sold primarily via self-serve annual and monthly SaaS subscriptions. In recent years, Artlist has integrated AI capabilities into its platform, including AI-driven search algorithms, AI voiceovers, and dynamic asset recommendation engines.

The flagship product, Artlist, began as a curated music and sound effects licensing library. In 2019, the company launched Artgrid to provide high-end, RAW stock footage. To expand into a broader suite of creator tools, Artlist acquired Motion Array in 2020 for approximately $65 million, adding video templates, presets, and plugins to its offering. In 2021, it acquired the UK-based company FXhome, bringing desktop video and photo editing software into its ecosystem.

Artlist competes directly with other major royalty-free asset libraries such as Epidemic Sound, Envato (specifically Envato Elements), and Storyblocks. The company positions itself as an all-in-one ecosystem for creators, leveraging a flat-rate, unlimited download pricing model to capture market share from traditional pay-per-track licensing sites. Through its strategic acquisitions of Motion Array and FXhome, Artlist has moved from a focused niche in music licensing to challenging broader creator software ecosystems.

The company's Israeli operations are split between the Tel Aviv headquarters and the original site in Kibbutz Afikim. The Israeli team spans R&D, product, ML/AI engineering, marketing, and a dedicated content curation and artist relations team. The founders are Israeli, and much of the core backend infrastructure, search technology, and AI integration is developed locally.