Tano raises $4 million seed round to automate creator marketing

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Tano raises $4M for creator marketing

Highlights

Tano raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures to invest in compute and expand its engineering and creator strategist teams.
Tano's AI-powered platform searches 280 million creator profiles, manages all campaign logistics, and charges per post, affiliate revenue share, or flat fee for large clients.
Tano claims major clients such as Unilever, HelloFresh, and Bloom & Wild, with its AI agents engaging over 5,000 creators monthly and reducing program hours 25-fold for a CPG client.

Funding plan and platform expansion

As first reported by Business Insider, citing CMO Insider, Tano says it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures and plans to use the money for compute and to grow its engineering and creator strategist teams. The startup, founded by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, is positioning its software as a simpler way for brands to buy creator marketing in a process that resembles self-serve digital advertising platforms.

Tano says its system combines AI agents with human creator strategists to search a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, assess audio and comment sentiment, and recommend creators for brand campaigns. The platform also handles outreach, contracts and payments, then tracks whether posts generate actions such as website clicks or sales and identifies strong-performing content for paid promotion.

Caplan says the goal is to remove the manual workload that has long defined influencer marketing, from recruiting creators to measuring outcomes. The company generally charges brands per creator post that goes live or takes a share of affiliate revenue, while some larger clients use a flat-fee arrangement.

Competition and demand from major brands

Tano is entering a crowded market that includes creator-marketing software companies such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, along with influencer agencies, affiliate-marketing networks including Impact.com and Awin, and larger advertising channels such as Meta and Google. Caplan says Tano’s edge lies in campaign data and in combining multiple parts of the creator marketing workflow into a single platform.

The company says its clients have included Unilever, HelloFresh, Skin+Me, Lovable and Bloom & Wild. It also says its AI agents are communicating with more than 5,000 creators a month, while one consumer goods client ran a creator program using 25 times fewer hours than a manual process.

Tano’s pitch to investors aligns with a broader shift among large advertisers toward scaled creator programs. Unilever has said it is working with more than 500,000 creators in its top markets and using AI to find them, while L'Oréal has also said it is managing a network of half a million creators.

We have previously detailed how cybersecurity funding rose to $6.8 billion in Q3 2026 as larger late-stage rounds lifted totals despite fewer deals.

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