While the creator marketplace has taken off over the past few years, the labor-intensive process of connecting with individual influencers means it’s woefully underused compared to more turnkey paid media channels.
Influencer marketing platform Agentio is looking to change that.
Historically, working with creators was an “archaic” and “opaque” process for marketers that involved manually finding a creator who fit the brand and reaching out to them directly, according to Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio. Most of the time, advertisers wouldn’t hear back.
Agentio aims to be a “frictionless” buying experience for creator marketing, similar to how DoubleClick and The Trade Desk enabled one-click ad buying in the early days of the internet, he said.
The platform uses AI to match brands to relevant creators by analyzing creator content and determining shared interests or goals. From there, the two parties can strike a deal.
As of right now, Agentio only works with creators on YouTube, though that may not be true for much longer. (More on that later.)
On Tuesday, Agentio announced $40M in Series B funding, led by Forerunner.
Under the influence
Agentio plans to use the new funding to bring its headcount from its current 35 to over 100 by increasing hiring on the product, engineering and go-to-market teams.
Agentio’s goal is to establish creator marketing as part of every advertiser’s media plan and to “make buying creative content as important and as easy as the way brands buy Meta ads and Google Ads today,” Leopold said.
The process is pretty straightforward: Advertisers share their brand goals and budget with Agentio. Then, its AI finds the best creators for them to partner with.
For instance, a health supplement brand might think that it should focus on health and wellness or fitness creators, said Co-Founder and CTO Jonathan Meyers. But Agentio can also find less obvious matches, he added, like a creator who works outdoors and needs to stay healthy and energized.
Recently, Agentio’s system identified a creator who had discussed an upcoming move, which sparked a partnership with Bilt Rewards (a rewards program with an emphasis on rent).
When determining brand-creator partnerships, “we don’t see vertical specificity as being the most important driver of engagement,” Leopold said. Instead, the best way to garner engagement is by having a creator who is genuinely excited about the product.
Howdy, partner(ships)
In addition to funneling more spend into the creator economy, the funding will also be used to advance to social platforms beyond YouTube. In early beta tests of Meta partnership ads with some clients, both advertisers and creators have seen positive results.
For marketers, the draw is access to creators on Meta’s platforms – although Meta emphasizes the importance of partnership ads, said Leopold, they’re “exceedingly hard to buy.”
On the other side, creators benefit from increased allocation of paid media budgets – more channels require more spending.
Campaign performance is another factor Agentio aims to improve. By using data from prior campaigns, Agentio can ensure the creative is likely to perform well.
When stars align
Ever since it was founded in 2023, Agentio has been an AI-native company – a draw for investors, said Leopold. The only way to drive transformation within the creator marketplace is “by automating away all the very manual, tedious things that marketers didn’t want to do and couldn’t scale,” Leopold said. Which demands AI.
Plus, Agentio has a skill that even some humans struggle with: It takes feedback.
If the advertiser isn’t happy with the suggested campaigns, the AI model will take note of that and curate future suggestions based on what the advertiser has implemented – and chosen to forgo – in the past. And the same goes for creators, too.
Agentio is constantly “aligning the system” to better understand both creators and brands, said Meyers, allowing the platform to constantly become “more powerful and more relevant.”
