Tano Raises $4M Seed to Make Creator Marketing Work Like Meta Ads

UK creator-marketing startup Tano has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, and it's spending the money on a bold claim: that influencer campaigns should run as automatically as Meta's ad platform.

The company, founded in 2025 by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, shared the round exclusively on Wednesday. Total funding now stands at $5 million, including earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund. Caplan, Tano's CEO, said the fresh capital will go into compute plus engineering and creator-strategist hires.

How does Tano's system actually work?

The platform pairs AI agents with human creator strategists. Those agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles — listening to creators' audio and analyzing comment sentiment to vet candidates. Recommendations can run into the tens of thousands of creators for a single brand, Caplan said.

The agents then handle everything from recruitment to contracts to payments. Once posts go live, Tano tracks whether they drove clicks or sales, and suggests the best performers for brands to boost with paid spend. Caplan calls this a "recursive loop," where performance data feeds back into the recommendation algorithm — a setup Tano's pitch deck compares to adtech company AppLovin's data engine.

"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 founders built the tool from personal frustration. As part-time creators — Caplan ran a tech and science TikTok account, Shah a YouTube channel on aerospace engineering — they tired of chasing deals by hand. "Why am I sending 50 emails to an influencer marketer to get paid £50? This just seems completely absurd," Caplan said.

What does this change for marketers?

The pitch lands amid evidence that big brands are already scaling creator programs with AI. Unilever, a Tano client, recently said it works with more than 500,000 creators in its top markets and uses AI to discover them. L'Oréal said this summer it manages a network of half a million creators. Tano's pitch deck leans on IAB data showing rising US brand spend on creators, and on a three-stage thesis: ad channels move from bought by hand, to bought via agencies, to bought through software — with influencer marketing, in Tano's telling, "stuck at stage two."

The company's deck also claims its AI agents communicate with more than 5,000 creators a month, and that one consumer goods client ran a program requiring "25 times fewer hours than doing it by hand." Those are founder-supplied numbers, not audited ones — worth noting before treating them as benchmarks.

Who's paying, and who's competing?

Tano charges brands per creator post that goes live, or a share of affiliate revenue; some larger clients prefer a flat fee. Named clients include Unilever, HelloFresh, Skin+Me, Bloom & Wild, and the AI company Lovable.

The field is crowded, though. Tano competes with creator-marketing software like CreatorIQ and Aspire, influencer agencies, and affiliate networks such as Impact.com and Awin — plus, for budget share, Meta and Google themselves. Caplan argues the differentiator is Tano's campaign data and its single-platform packaging, but the company hasn't disclosed revenue or retention figures to back that up.

Caplan's CV includes growing his sister's interior design Instagram account, @oliviacaplandesign, past 200,000 followers, plus stints at Onfido and AI data infrastructure firm Encord. Shah moved from aerospace engineering into software at Accenture, Let's Do This, and Holly.

With $5 million in the bank and a seed-stage team, Tano now has to prove its Meta-style automation can out-deliver entrenched agencies and ad platforms at the scale its deck promises.