London-based Tano has raised a $4M (about £3M) seed round led by Cherry Ventures, bringing its total funding to $5M.
Brands have spent heavily on creator marketing for years, but scaling it has meant one of two things: buying software and hiring a team to run it, or paying an agency. Either way, growth is capped by headcount. Every creator has to be found, vetted, briefed, contracted and paid, which makes thousands of smaller partnerships too costly to manage, so most budget stays with Meta and Google. Cofounder and CEO Will Caplan, who ran a science and tech TikTok account before starting the company, saw the problem from the creator side. "Why am I sending 50 emails to an influencer marketer to get paid £50?" he told Business Insider.
Founded in 2025 by Caplan and CTO Sagar Shah, Tano combines AI agents with in-house creator strategists. Its agents search a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, judge fit by listening to their audio and reading the sentiment in their comments, then handle outreach, contracts, product seeding and payments. Tracking links, discount codes and commerce integrations tie posts to sales, and the strongest content can be turned into paid ads with the creator's permission. Those results feed back into who the system recruits next. Brands set an objective and a budget, and Tano charges per creator post that goes live or takes a share of affiliate revenue, with some larger clients on a flat fee. It runs programmes across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
Clients include Unilever, HelloFresh, Bloom & Wild, Skin+Me, Papier and Lovable. Tano reports that HelloFresh lifted its conversion rate by 93%, Bloom & Wild's creator-led ads delivered 125% higher click-through rates and Papier's return on ad spend rose 25%. Its agents now hold tens of thousands of creator conversations a month, and the company says creator posts rose 139% and creator-driven sales rose 113% in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the second. Tano previously raised an inception round led by Seedcamp, with The Players Fund and Operators & Friends taking part.
Seedcamp and The Players Fund also backed the new round. Tano will spend the money on compute and on hiring engineers and creator strategists. It faces competition from creator platforms such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, affiliate networks including Impact.com and Awin, and the agencies it aims to replace. Cherry partner Dinika Mahtani said the founders' own time as creators showed them exactly where the agency model breaks down.