Tano Raises $4M to Automate Creator Marketing for Brands

Tano Raises $4M Seed to Automate Creator Marketing UK startup Tano has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, bringing its total funding to $5 million after earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund. Founded in 2025 by cofounders Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, Tano aims to simplify and automate creator marketing by combining AI agents with human creator strategists. The company wants to replace much of the manual work involved in matching brands with influencers, negotiating deals, managing contracts, and tracking campaign performance. Caplan, Tano’s CEO, said the founders experienced the process firsthand as part-time creators and grew frustrated with inefficient brand-deal outreach. Tano’s platform scans a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, analyzing audio content and audience sentiment to identify suitable creators for brand campaigns. Its AI agents handle creator recruitment, communication, contracting, and payments, while also monitoring whether posts drive outcomes such as website clicks or sales. The platform then suggests high-performing posts for brands to amplify through paid advertising, creating a feedback loop that informs future recommendations. Tano’s pitch is to make creator marketing more programmatic, similar to self-service advertising platforms. Brands could, in theory, input budgets and campaign objectives while the platform manages the operational details and returns performance results. This approach positions Tano against creator-marketing software providers such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, as well as affiliate networks and influencer agencies, while also competing for budgets with major ad channels including Meta and Google. The company says its differentiator lies in consolidating campaign data and workflow management into one platform. Tano’s clients have included Unilever, HelloFresh, Lovable, Skin+Me, and Bloom & Wild. Its pricing model generally charges brands per published creator post or takes a share of affiliate revenue, with some larger clients using flat-fee arrangements. The new funding will be used to expand compute infrastructure and grow Tano’s engineering and creator-strategist teams as the company scales.