Tano raises $4M to make creator marketing work like Meta's ad manager

Tano, a UK startup founded in 2025, has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures to replace the email-heavy handshake economics of influencer marketing with something closer to a self-serve ad platform. The round brings the company's total funding to $5 million, on top of earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

The pitch is simple: brands should buy creator campaigns the way they buy Meta ads. "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," said CEO Will Caplan.

What do the AI agents actually do?

Tano's agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles. They listen to creators' audio and analyze the sentiment in comment sections to vet candidates before recommending them to a brand. Those recommendations can run into the tens of thousands of creators, Caplan said.

The agents also handle communication end to end — recruitment, contracts, and payments. Once posts go live, the platform tracks whether they drove actions like website clicks or sales, then suggests the best-performing posts for brands to boost with paid advertising. Those data signals feed back into the recommendation algorithm, which Caplan calls a "recursive loop" modeled on Meta's ad platform.

Per the pitch deck, the agents are already communicating with more than 5,000 creators a month, and Tano compares its data engine to the one operated by adtech company AppLovin. One consumer goods client, the deck claims, ran a creator program that required "25 times fewer hours than doing it by hand" — a manual process that, at agency rates, is the cost Tano is really attacking.

Why did the founders build it?

Caplan and cofounder Sagar Shah are part-time creators themselves. Caplan runs a tech and science TikTok account; Shah runs a YouTube channel about aerospace engineering. Both grew frustrated with the manual grunt work of securing brand deals.

"Why am I sending 50 emails to an influencer marketer to get paid £50? This just seems completely absurd," Caplan said. That ratio — fifty emails for fifty pounds — is the wedge Tano is driving into the market.

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

Who is using it, and at what scale?

The scale of modern creator programs is the tailwind Tano is riding. 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.

Tano's client list includes Unilever, the AI company Lovable, meal-delivery company HelloFresh, skincare brand Skin+Me, and flower-delivery service Bloom & Wild. Pricing is generally per creator post that goes live, or a share of affiliate revenue, though some larger clients prefer a flat fee.

How crowded is the field?

Very. Tano competes with creator-marketing software platforms such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, influencer agencies, and affiliate networks like Impact.com and Awin — and it vies for the same budgets as Meta and Google. Caplan argues the differentiator is Tano's campaign data plus its bundling of matchmaking, contracting, payment, and performance boosting into one platform.

The pitch deck positions this as a historical inevitability: new ad channels move through three stages — bought by hand, bought via agencies, bought through software — and influencer marketing is "stuck at stage two." Tano, which describes itself as "the programmatic layer for creator marketing," wants to push it to stage three. The fresh $4 million will fund compute and grow the engineering and creator strategist teams. Whether brands treat creators as programmatically buyable inventory — or keep insisting on human relationships — is the bet the round settles.