A UK startup built by two part-time creators wants brands to buy influencer campaigns the way they buy Facebook ads: set a budget, pick a goal, and let the software do the rest. According to Business Insider‘s Lara O’Reilly, Tano has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures.
As Tech.eu‘s Tamara Djurickovic reports, the round brings Tano’s total funding to $5 million, after earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.
Built out of brand-deal frustration
Tano was founded in 2025 by Will Caplan, the CEO, and Sagar Shah. Both make content on the side. Caplan runs a TikTok account about tech and science, and Shah has a YouTube channel about aerospace engineering. They told Business Insider they got fed up with how manual brand deals are.
“Why am I sending 50 emails to an influencer marketer to get paid £50? This just seems completely absurd,” Caplan said.
AI agents plus human strategists
The platform mixes AI agents with human “creator strategists.” Per Business Insider, the agents search a database of more than 280 million creator profiles. They listen to the creators’ audio and read the mood of their comment sections to suggest who fits a brand. Sometimes that list runs into the tens of thousands of creators.
The agents also handle the back-and-forth with creators, from recruiting and contracts to payments. Tech.eu adds that the system covers product seeding and rewards too, so brands can run ongoing campaigns across thousands of creators instead of a few one-off deals.
Measured like an ad channel
Tano tracks when posts go live and whether they drive clicks or sales, using tracking links, discount codes and store integrations. It then points brands to the best posts to boost as paid ads, with the creator’s permission. Caplan described this as a “recursive loop,” similar to Meta’s ad system, where results feed back into who gets picked next.
“Brands should be able to set a commercial objective and invest predictably into creator advertising, just like they invest in Meta or Google,” Caplan said in comments reported by Tech.eu.
Business Insider says clients have included Lovable, HelloFresh and Skin+Me, and that Unilever is a client too. Tano usually charges brands for each creator post that goes live or takes a share of affiliate sales, though some bigger clients pay a flat fee.
A crowded field
Tano is up against creator software such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, plus influencer agencies and affiliate networks like Impact.com and Awin. The scale is already huge on the brand side. Business Insider notes Unilever recently said it works with more than 500,000 creators in its top markets, and L’Oréal said this summer it manages a network of about half a million.
The new money will go toward computing power and hiring more engineers and creator strategists.
The takeaway
For creators, the pitch cuts both ways. Software that ends the 50-email chase for a £50 deal could mean faster deals and quicker pay. But when brands buy creators like ad slots, and pay per post or per sale, the creators with clean, trackable results are the ones who keep getting picked.
