Agentio has raised $40 million in new funding as it expands its creator marketplace from YouTube into the wider short-form and social video landscape. The Series B round was led by Forerunner, the consumer-focused venture firm, and values the startup at $340 million as it doubles and triples down on multi-platform expansion and AI-driven campaign tooling.
Forerunner leads Agentio’s $40 million Series B funding
Besides Forerunner, previous investors that include Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp and Antler also participated in the round. The raise brings Agentio’s total capital to $56 million, and it also raised at a skyrocketing valuation; Block said that since the company last raised money it has by its estimation grown fivefold in scale and headcount from about a dozen employees to 35, with plans to grow to over 100.
(CEO Arthur Leopold was previously a president at Cameo, while CTO Jonathan Meyers came from Spotify’s automated marketing team.) Ever since then, Agentio had been built as a YouTube sponsorship business. Now, it hopes to make that matching and measuring stack a cross-platform operating system for creator-led performance advertising.
Moving beyond YouTube to multi-platform campaign scale
Agentio is beta testing campaigns on the Meta platforms, focusing on Reels and leveraging partnership ads running under a brand’s handle rather than organic creator posts on the main feed. The company notes that many creators on its platform already have large, engaged followings on Instagram, which allows for accelerated multi-channel campaign launches. Expansion to more platforms like TikTok and Snap is on the roadmap.
The timing coincides with broader creator-market momentum. Tubefilter estimates that views of sponsored YouTube videos are up 28% year over year, and the volume of sponsored uploads grew by 54% in the first half of this year — a sign that advertisers are starting to move dollars out from interruptive formats into creator-led ones where attention and conversion may be more attributable.
AI powers Agentio’s campaign tooling and creator matches
Agentio has relied heavily on AI, incorporating reasoning models and multimodal analysis into its workflow. A campaign manager helps marketers structure briefs, budgets and audience targets; endemic risk classifiers recommend creators who would appeal to a company’s desired risk profile; and an asset reviewer examines drafts against the brief prior to going live, reducing what was once hour-by-hour manual checks to minutes.
It also helps to expand the talent pool of the creators in the stack. Unlike profiling that’s based solely on obvious verticals, Agentio can surface effective but untraditional pairings — think an outdoor survival channel for a health supplement brand — using audience affinities and historical conversion, not just category labels.
Performance Signals For Brands & Creators
Brands are seeing performance lift versus legacy digital channels, Agentio says. In one example cited, Bombas saw a 5.3x return on ad spend with 90% of customers being net new — versus its general video ad spend. The company also says that advertisers who usually take about six months to ramp up budgets on top ad networks can do so much faster on its marketplace — and with unit economics.
On the supply side, tens of millions of dollars have been paid out to creators on the platform. Brand-partnership earnings by newly arrived joiners have more than doubled in half a year, while the time between onboarding and first bid has dropped from around six weeks to less than 24 hours — evidence that activity is picking up among both buyers and sellers in the market.
Why this funding round matters for brands and creators
“As privacy changes and loss of signal, along with increasing acquisition costs, eat away at traditional social and search ads, brands are leaning more into creator integrations that bridge upfront storytelling with something much more performance oriented,” Leff said. Influencer ad spend has remained in the double digits through 2021, according to Insider Intelligence, and banks — including Goldman Sachs — have estimated that the creator economy might be on its way to becoming a half-trillion-dollar opportunity in just several years. Agentio’s bet is that performance-grade tooling — targeting, measurement and brand safety — will help unlock more of this spend.
Forerunner’s involvement also highlights the retail and consumer commerce angle: The firm has long invested in startups that seek brand-safe customer acquisition, including those running efficient businesses. If Agentio is able to continue finding a match as it scales into short-form feeds and new formats, it could be many marketers’ default buy for moving budgets from saturated channels to creator-led performance media.
The next test is execution at scale: bringing the same ROI and speed-to-live to Reels, then TikTok and Snap, without eroding creator experience or safety guardrails. With new capital and increasing demand on both sides of the marketplace, Agentio is about to see.
