London startup Tano has secured $4M in a seed round, an early investment that helps a young company build its product. Tano runs influencer marketing, where brands pay social media creators to feature their products, using AI agents that carry out tasks on their own.
Berlin venture capital firm Cherry Ventures led the round. Earlier backers Seedcamp and The Players Fund also invested, bringing Tano’s total funding to $5M.
The company plans to hire engineers and creator strategists, develop its platform further and run more creator advertising for brands.
Tano says traditional influencer agencies rely on staff to find creators and manage each deal by hand, and it pitches its service as the alternative. Its aim is to let brands buy creator content in a more predictable way, closer to how they buy ads on Meta.
How Tano’s AI Agents Work
Running influencer marketing at scale means finding suitable creators, sending them products, agreeing terms, paying them and tracking whether their posts lead to sales.
Tano’s AI agents take on much of that work. They search for creators, contact them by email and send out free products. They then handle payments and rewards and track what gets posted. According to Tano, its in-house strategists make the key decisions on each programme.
The service covers TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Tano says its agents search a pool of 230 million creators and score each creator on their likelihood of posting and driving sales. Campaigns range from 10 creators to more than 1,000.
Brands set the goal, choose the products to send and set rules, such as a ban on working with competitors and clear labels on paid posts. Tano then tests different ways of recruiting and rewarding creators and expands whatever performs best.
To measure results, the platform uses tracking links, discount codes and connections to online store platforms such as Shopify. With the creator’s permission, brands can also reuse creator videos as paid ads.
Creator payments run through Lumanu, a payments company that handles affiliate and flat fees for Tano. Creators can be paid in their local currency, and Lumanu collects tax forms and runs compliance checks. Tano says this arrangement has let it support campaigns with more than 4,000 creators without adding staff.
What Tano Reports So Far
Tano names Bloom & Wild, Skin+Me and HelloFresh among its customers. Bloom & Wild sells flowers and gifts online, Skin+Me sells prescription skincare and HelloFresh delivers meal kits.
Click-through rate measures the share of viewers who click on an ad. Tano says Bloom & Wild’s was 125% higher on its programme. The brand also paid 10% less to win each new customer, a figure marketers call cost per acquisition.
For HelloFresh, the company reports a 93% rise in conversion rate against the brand’s in-house programme, meaning a larger share of viewers went on to buy. Across clients, Tano says creator content has produced a click-through rate 68% higher on average than ads made by the brands themselves.
The company also reports that 96% of creators it surveyed rated its communication as excellent. The figures come from Tano, and Morning Tick could not verify them independently.
Brands do not buy software licences from Tano. Each pays a fee tailored to its programme, which can include a charge per published post and a share of affiliate revenue, the commission earned on sales made through creator links. The company says it does not tie brands to annual contracts.
From Angel Round To Seed
Chief executive Will Caplan co-founded Tano with Sagar Shah. In November 2025, the company announced an angel round led by Seedcamp and joined by The Players Fund and Operators & Friends. Angel rounds are small early investments, often from individuals.
At that point, Tano focused on fast-moving consumer goods brands, which sell everyday items such as food and toiletries. It said it had grown 70% a month since launching a few months earlier.
Cherry Ventures, which led the new round, also led a recent investment in German satellite startup Marble Imaging.
“Brands should be able to set a commercial objective and invest predictably into creator advertising,” Caplan said. He described the long-term goal as follows: “Our vision is to build the world’s largest advertising channel for commerce, powered by people.”
In an earlier interview, the chief executive said Tano uses AI where the technology adds the most. “It finds the right creators from data no team could process by hand,” he said.
A Growing Budget Line
Advertisers are putting more of their budgets into creator content. US advertisers were expected to spend $37bn on it in 2025, up 26% on the year before, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a US trade body for digital advertising.
The IAB said that was about four times the growth rate of the wider media industry. Its research also found that a third of brands named finding the right creators as their biggest hurdle. Some 40% of buyers ranked return on investment, what they earn back on their spending, as their main measure of success.
Close to three in four creator ad buyers were already using AI or planned to do so within a year, the IAB found. Almost all advertisers (95%) had concerns about using AI in creator marketing, with loss of human connection the top worry.
Other startups are also applying AI agents to service work long done by hand. London startup Ancep is building agents that handle routine tasks for insurance brokers.
Tano now has $5M in total funding and counts Bloom & Wild, Skin+Me and HelloFresh among its customers. The new money will pay for more staff and further development. The company is pairing AI agents with human strategists to make creator marketing work more like a standard ad channel for consumer brands.
