Tano raises $4M seed to make creator buying work like Meta ads

UK startup Tano has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, and its founders want to do to influencer marketing what Meta's ad platform did to media buying: take the mess out of the middle. The round, announced Wednesday to CMO Insider, brings Tano's total funding to $5 million, on top of earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

CEO Will Caplan and cofounder Sagar Shah are building the platform they wish had existed when they worked as part-time creators — Caplan on a tech and science TikTok account, Shah on a YouTube channel about aerospace engineering. Their frustration was specific and, frankly, cheap.

"Why am I sending 50 emails to an influencer marketer to get paid £50? This just seems completely absurd," Caplan said.

What does the $4 million buy?

Founded in 2025, Tano blends AI agents with human creator strategists. Caplan says the fresh capital goes into compute and into growing the engineering and creator strategist teams.

The tech itself scans a database of more than 280 million creator profiles. Its agents listen to creators' audio and analyze the sentiment in comment sections to vet and recommend candidates for a brand. The shortlists can get long — sometimes running into the tens of thousands of creators, Caplan said.

That scale matches what big advertisers are already doing. Unilever, a Tano client, recently said it works with more than 500,000 creators across its top markets and leans on AI to find them. L'Oréal said this summer it manages a network of half a million creators.

How close is this to buying Meta ads?

Tano's agents handle everything from recruitment to contracts to payments, which spares brands the email chains Caplan once endured. The platform tracks when creator posts go live, whether they drove clicks or sales, and then suggests the best-performing posts for brands to boost with paid media. Those signals feed back into the recommendation algorithm — a "recursive loop," in Caplan's words, modeled on how Meta's ad platform works.

"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," Caplan said.

The pitch deck leans hard on this analogy. Tano describes itself as "the programmatic layer for creator marketing" and argues every new ad channel moves through three stages: bought by hand, bought via agencies, and bought through software. Influencer marketing, it says, is stuck at stage two. The deck also compares Tano's data engine to the one adtech company AppLovin operates, and claims its AI agents communicate with more than 5,000 creators a month. One consumer goods client, Tano says, ran a program requiring "25 times fewer hours than doing it by hand."

Who's buying, and who's competing?

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

The field is crowded. Tano competes with creator-marketing software platforms such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, influencer agencies, and affiliate networks like Impact.com and Awin. It also vies for budget with Meta and Google themselves. Caplan's claimed differentiator is Tano's data on client campaigns and its packaging of every campaign element into a single platform.

The founders bring some receipts of their own. Caplan grew his sister's interior design Instagram account, @oliviacaplandesign, past 200,000 followers and previously worked at Onfido and the AI data infrastructure company Encord. Shah trained as an aerospace engineer before writing software at Accenture and the UK startups Let's Do This and Holly.

The pitch deck cites IAB data on rising US brand spend on creators as the market backdrop. Whether creator marketing actually graduates to stage three — bought through software — is now a $5 million question. Caplan, for one, thinks the messy work is done behind the scenes.