Will Caplan and Sagar Shah are building the influencer marketing platform they wish had existed when they started out as creators.
The duo is behind Tano, a UK-based startup that wants to take on advertising and influencer agencies by simplifying and automating the process of matchmaking brands with creators and running influencer marketing campaigns.
On Wednesday, Tano exclusively shared with CMO Insider that it has raised a $4 million seed round, led by Cherry Ventures. It plans to invest the fresh funds in compute and growing its engineering and creator strategist teams, said Caplan, Tano’s CEO.
As part-time creators, with Caplan running a tech and science-focused TikTok account and Shah operating a YouTube channel about aerospace engineering, the pair said they grew frustrated with the manual process 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.
Founded in 2025, Tano’s platform blends AI agents with human creator strategists. Tano’s agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, listening to their audio and analyzing the sentiment in the comment section to vet and recommend creators who might be a good fit for a brand.
Sometimes those recommendations can run into the tens of thousands of creators, Caplan said. The scale reflects a broader trend that’s happened among big brands. Unilever — a Tano client — recently said it’s working with more than 500,000 creators in its top markets, and leaning on AI to discover them. Elsewhere, L’Oréal said this summer it’s managing a network of half a million creators.
Tano’s agents handle all the communication with the creators, from recruitment to contracts and payments. The platform tracks when creator posts go live, whether they’ve driven actions like website clicks or sales, then suggests the best-performing posts for brands to boost with paid advertising. Caplan said the process builds a “recursive loop,” similar to Meta’s ad platform, in which these data signals feed back into its recommendation algorithm.
“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.
Tano is entering a crowded field, competing with creator-marketing software platforms such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, as well as influencer agencies and affiliate-marketing networks such as Impact.com and Awin. It also vies for marketing budgets with larger advertising channels, such as Meta or Google.
Caplan said Tano’s differentiator is its data on client campaigns and its packaging of the various elements of a creator marketing campaign into a single platform. It has counted the AI company Lovable, the meal-delivery company HelloFresh, and the skincare brand Skin+Me among its clients. The company generally charges brands per creator post that goes live, or a share of affiliate revenue, though some larger clients prefer a flat-fee model.
The latest round brings Tano’s total funding to $5 million, having received earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.
Check out the pitch deck Tano used to secure its $4 million seed investment, shared exclusively with CMO Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.
Tano describes itself as ‘the programmatic layer for creator marketing.’
This slide details the bios of the Tano cofounders.
Caplan helped grow his sister’s interior design Instagram account, @oliviacaplandesign, to more than 200,000 followers. He also previously worked at Onfido and at the AI data infrastructure company Encord.
Shah trained as an aerospace engineer and later transitioned to software engineering at companies including Accenture and UK-based startups Let’s Do This and Holly.
Tano cites data from the IAB showing the rise of US brand spend on creators.
Tano outlines the three stages of new ad channels: bought by hand, bought via agencies, and bought through software.
Tano says creator marketing is the next big platform to embrace programmatic.
Tano says influencer marketing is currently ‘stuck at stage two.’
Tano says it can find and vet a large amount of creators faster than the big agency groups.
Tano’s AI agents are communicating with more than 5,000 creators a month.
Tano compares its platform to the data engine operated by adtech company AppLovin.
Tano says a consumer goods client ran a creator marketing program that required ’25 times fewer hours than doing it by hand.’
Tano clients have included the flower-delivery service Bloom & Wild, Unilever, HelloFresh, and Skin+Me.
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