Agentio, the first-of-its-kind AI-powered ad platform for sponsored creator content, launched today with $4.25M in seed investment funding. The round was co-led by Craft Ventures & AlleyCorp, with participation from additional institutional investors including Antler, Protagonist, and Permanent Capital.
Other strategic investors include Neal Arthur (Global CEO of Wieden+Kennedy); Cody Ko (Mega-creator); Rory Paterson (Global Vice President of Media, Expedia Group); Jeff Ragovin (Co-Founder Buddy Media /Salesforce); Michael Sugar (Academy Award-winning producer); Steven Galanis (Co-Founder of Cameo); and Elizabeth Cutler (Co-Founder, SoulCycle and Peoplehood) in addition to other leading creators and marketing leaders.
Agentio was co-founded by Arthur Leopold, former President and first employee at Cameo, who led all go-to-market functions and scaled the celebrity talent marketplace that drove $500M in sales, and Jonathan Meyers, a former engineer and manager at Spotify who led the Automated Content Marketing team that drove multi-million monthly active user outcomes using AI/ML. The duo has now launched the first automated ad platform for creator content, starting with YouTube creator-led sponsored content ad reads, leveraging the team’s firsthand experience with the pain points that both creators and marketers face.
Until today, the process of connecting creators to marketers has been manual and labor intensive, and has largely been conducted offline at great expense to both sides. Agentio’s platform now makes it as easy to buy sponsored content as buying Facebook and Google ads. By automating a previously unscalable process, Agentio aims to shift a meaningful percentage of the $300B digital ad spend market to highly-performant, creator-led ad reads. Agentio is launching with 30+ second creator-led ad reads on YouTube, capitalizing on an underpriced and under-monetized ad unit with abundant inventory from top creators. The team will then rapidly expand to other ad channels.
“Marketers need a performant and scalable ad channel more than ever, and we’re unlocking humanized and authentic content, in a programmatic way through our first-of-its-kind technology,” says Arthur Leopold, Co-Founder & CEO at Agentio. “We’re thrilled to partner with leading VCs, marketers, and creators to finally scale this ad unit and drive real, measurable business outcomes through underserved and undervalued attention on YouTube.”
The Agentio ad platform offers marketers direct access to a premium network of creators with bespoke and highly engaged audiences. Its patent-pending AI technology automates creator and brand matches relevant to a brand’s audience by giving marketers a superhuman understanding of a creator. Agentio also offers more liquidity and revenue to creators, enabling them to list their inventory in real-time, so that brands can auto-bid on available ad inventory, in seconds. Agentio’s first-of-its-kind technology enables brands to significantly scale their creator campaigns, without additional bandwidth constraints.
“Agentio’s platform is an industry-first, utilizing predictive models to match creators and brands seamlessly,” says Jonathan Meyers, Co-Founder & CTO of Agentio. “With access to first-party ad performance data and a machine level understanding of creator content, our product’s ability to deliver authentic and performant ad reads through end-to-end automation, is highly-contrarian and will completely transform the way sponsored ad content occurs across various social channels.”
“Creator-led marketing is one of the most effective ways to advertise, but the challenge is scaling these programs across platforms,” said Bryan Rosenblatt, partner at Craft Ventures. “Agentio is building a standardized, scalable platform that combines the easy, modern ad buying experience marketers have come to expect with the magic of pairing the right creator with the right advertiser. This is something that many of our portfolio companies have been asking for, and that the broader advertising industry needs.”
Agentio has already launched a beta-version of the platform with leading spenders of YouTube sponsored content and top creators. The funding will be used to accelerate Agentio’s product development and go-to-market strategy with creators and brands.
“We are thrilled to back Agentio and firmly believe that the Agentio team is poised to reinvent how sponsored content is built, bought, and sold,” says Susannah Shipton, Partner at AlleyCorp. “In the same way that DoubleClick revolutionized display advertising (and ultimately built the infrastructure for ad content on the internet), we expect that Agentio will build the new infrastructural engine for sponsored content – a far bigger market opportunity. Just as importantly, we believe that using Agentio will be a massive unlock for creators and marketers in terms of time and expense, meaning they can spend more time doing what they do best: creating enduring content that engages audiences around the world.”
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