Tano raises $4M seed to make creator marketing work like Meta ads

UK startup Tano has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures to automate creator marketing the way Meta automated media buying.

The round, shared exclusively with CMO Insider on Wednesday, brings Tano's total funding to $5 million. Earlier backing came from Seedcamp and The Players Fund. CEO Will Caplan said the company will spend the fresh capital on compute and on expanding its engineering and creator strategist teams.

Caplan and cofounder Sagar Shah built the platform they wished had existed when they worked as part-time creators. Caplan ran a tech and science TikTok account; Shah operated a YouTube channel on aerospace engineering. Both hit the same wall: brand deals took dozens of manual emails for small payouts.

"Why am I sending 50 emails to an influencer marketer to get paid £50? This just seems completely absurd," Caplan said.

How does the platform actually work?

Founded in 2025, Tano pairs AI agents with human creator strategists. The agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles. They listen to creator audio and analyze sentiment in comment sections to vet candidates and recommend matches for a brand. Recommendations can run into the tens of thousands of creators, Caplan said.

The agents then handle every step of communication — recruitment, contracts and payments. The platform tracks when posts go live and whether they drive actions such as website clicks or sales. It then flags the best-performing posts for brands to boost with paid advertising. Caplan calls the mechanism a "recursive loop": performance signals feed back into the recommendation algorithm, the same feedback structure that powers Meta's ad platform.

"A brand should be able to come to a creator advertising platform and allocate their budget and the intent, and then they should be able to return, just like you go onto Meta, and put in your budget, you put in your campaign objective, and Meta does all the messy work behind the scenes, and then gives you a return," Caplan said.

The scale matches how big advertisers now operate. Unilever, a Tano client, recently said it works with more than 500,000 creators in its top markets and leans on AI to discover them. L'Oréal said this summer it manages a network of half a million creators.

Who is Tano up against?

The field is crowded. Tano competes with creator-marketing software platforms such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, with influencer agencies, and with affiliate-marketing networks such as Impact.com and Awin. It also vies for budget with the largest ad channels of all, Meta and Google.

Caplan points to two differentiators: Tano's data on client campaigns, and its packaging of every element of a creator campaign into a single platform. Its pitch deck, shared with CMO Insider, describes the company as "the programmatic layer for creator marketing" and argues influencer marketing is "stuck at stage two" — bought via agencies — of a three-stage evolution from hand-bought to software-bought ad channels.

The deck also makes concrete performance claims. One slide says Tano's AI agents communicate with more than 5,000 creators a month. Another says a consumer goods client ran a creator program that required "25 times fewer hours than doing it by hand." A further slide compares Tano's data engine to the one operated by adtech company AppLovin.

Clients listed in the deck include Unilever, HelloFresh, Skin+Me, the AI company Lovable, and the flower-delivery service Bloom & Wild. Tano generally charges brands per creator post that goes live, or takes a share of affiliate revenue, though some larger clients prefer a flat-fee model.

What does the funding buy?

The founders bring complementary backgrounds. Caplan previously worked at identity firm Onfido and AI data infrastructure company Encord, and grew his sister's interior design Instagram account, @oliviacaplandesign, past 200,000 followers. Shah trained as an aerospace engineer before moving into software engineering at Accenture and UK startups Let's Do This and Holly.

The $4 million bet rests on a simple thesis from the pitch deck: IAB data shows US brand spend on creators keeps rising, and every mature ad channel eventually moves from manual buying to software. If Caplan and Shah can close the loop between creator discovery and paid amplification, they will compete for a slice of the budgets currently split between agencies, affiliate networks and Meta itself.