Agentio Raises $40 Million as It Expands Beyond YouTube

Social media influencer marketplace Agentio raises $40M, led by Forerunner, to expand its creator storefront beyond YouTube.

Venture investors are betting deals between brands and creators working on sponsored content will grow from experimental spend to a core channel for advertisers, making platforms like Walmart-backed Agentio valuable as investments. The funding, a Series B that values the company at $340 million, sees Agentio expand its offer to more social platforms and develop its AI-driven workflow for advertisers and creators.

Funding round details and growing momentum at Agentio

Forerunner led the round, with others taking part including earlier backers Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler and Starting Line. The company, led by CEO Arthur Leopold and CTO Jonathan Meyers who’d previously cut their teeth at Cameo and Spotify’s automated marketing team, respectively, says revenue has increased several times over since its last raise as larger brands look to standardize influencer partnerships alongside paid social.

Agentio has increased its staff from a dozen to 35, and is planning to hire beyond 100 workers for product, sales and trust-and-safety operations. That the firm had been monitoring Agentio’s effect across portfolio brands early on was an early indicator of whether the market could sustain repeatable, scalable results rather than any one-off creator test, said Forerunner managing partner Eurie Kim.

AI-Native Workflow For Brand Safety And Speed

Agentio’s stack is based on reasoning models and multimodal analysis to make campaign setup and quality control more streamlined. An AI campaign manager is meant to help marketers translate briefs, budgets and performance goals into who creators should be selected and where they should be placed, whereas a Content Review will evaluate draft videos against the brief and brand safety criteria before going live.

The tangible effect is fewer buckets of checklists and faster flighting. What once took a coordinator watching every video is now flagged automatically for compliance, tone and disclosure. That time adds up at scale: when a brand is working with dozens of creators, minutes saved per asset add up to days shaved off a launch window.

Key performance data points and advertiser outcomes

According to Agentio, brands are seeing measurable benefits. Portal time spent on Artifact Uprising’s site increased 1.5 times, and the average number of items per cart grew 2x compared with its regular video ad buys, while Bombas, a seller of socks and apparel, experienced a return on ad spend from Agentio placements of 5.3x with a net new customer rate of 90% relative to other video advertising investments, according to the company. Marketers say budgets are cycling faster on the app than on Meta or Google, and that returns are comparable if not better when attribution windows align.

On the supply side, to date Agentio has paid creators tens of millions of dollars. New creators doubled or more the amount they were earning in brand-partnership dollars on average within six months, and time to first bid dropped from roughly 45–50 days to less than a day as liquidity increased. This kind of velocity says you’ve got a healthy two-sided market where matching quality (not just volume) is on the rise.

Expanding beyond YouTube to additional social platforms

While Agentio has so far focused mainly on YouTube, the company is beta testing Meta platforms, concentrating on short-form video formats such as Reels. The company is allowing creators and brands to work together and then boost the content with partnership ads that aren’t in-your-face on the main feed but do drive incremental reach and sales.

Since many of the creators participating already have thousands or even millions of followers on Instagram, Agentio can add new reach to a campaign without having to rebuild rosters. The roadmap supports TikTok and Snap expansions: “We are very excited about TikTok and there is some early interest from B2B marketers in finding niche creators where trust and domain authority can outstrip reach,” the roadmap says.

Current Market Environment And Competitive Advantage

Creator advertising is up across the board. A recent analysis by Tubefilter found that the views on sponsored YouTube videos went up 28% year over year, while the total amount of sponsored videos increased by 54%. As Insider Intelligence and the IAB have noted, creator media could continue to draw brand dollars as measurement gets better and buyers look for more options outside of auction formats that have been inundated by rising CPMs.

Agentio is differentiating on three levers: being a fortress of brand safety, paired with speed and clear ROAS. Its AI review minimizes the hidden costs that typically send brands running back to traditional media. Its matching engine looks beyond obvious pairings, like connecting an outdoor creator with a wellness brand when audience behavior — and not just content category — indicates intent. And its marketplace design renders budget pacing predictable, which is key for performance marketers managing the profitability of cohorts.

What to watch next as Agentio scales across platforms

The capital will probably go into engineering, data infrastructure and cross-platform measurement — specifically incrementality testing and standardized disclosure audits that big advertisers are accustomed to. Combine that with the fact that Agentio can maintain brand safety at scale as it adds short-form and multi-platform bundles, and it could be a default digital line item alongside paid social and search.

The risk is complexity of execution as formats, algorithms and disclosure rules change.

But as performance data points improve and with a war chest to develop, Agentio is positioned to ride a structural change: creators are not just media — they’re distribution channels with built-in trust, and brands want that advantage hard-coded into their media plans.