Views on sponsored movies on YouTube have risen 28% year-on-year, and the variety of sponsored movies has grown by 54% year-on-year within the first half of 2025, based on a report from Tubefilter. What’s extra, advert spend by way of creator channels has been steadily rising and is even set to outperform conventional media in some instances.
Buoyed by these alerts, Agentio, a startup that connects manufacturers with YouTube creators for sponsored movies, has raised its third funding spherical of $40 million in as a few years. The Sequence B spherical is led by consumer-focused VC Forerunner with participation from present traders Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Beginning Line. This spherical brings Agentio’s complete fundraising to $56 million, valuing the corporate at $340 million.
The startup was based in 2023 by CEO Arthur Leopold, former president at celeb expertise market Cameo, and CTO Jonathan Meyers, a former Spotify engineer who led the corporate’s automated content material advertising and marketing staff. Since its final funding spherical in November 2024, Agentio has grown fivefold.
The startup mentioned that manufacturers have seen spectacular beneficial properties of their campaigns on Agentio. For instance, the corporate mentioned that Bombas, a socks and attire model, noticed 5.3x higher return on advert spend and a 90% internet new buyer price from Agentio campaigns as in comparison with video advert spending on different platforms. Agentio additionally mentioned that manufacturers that sometimes take over six months to spend their advert budgets on Meta and Google might do it in a couple of months by way of Agentio’s platform with higher returns.
“The challenge historically before Agentio was for brands to partner with creators at scale. Our belief since we founded the company has been to use AI to automate the ad buying process for brands to get the best outcomes. As AI content has started to proliferate in people’s feeds, we are seeing that brands realize that this level of trust that creators have with their audiences is unbeatable,” Leopold advised TechCrunch over a name.
The corporate didn’t present precise figures however mentioned that it has now paid tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to creators. It famous that over the course of final yr, creators becoming a member of Agentio have been in a position to greater than double their model partnership earnings inside six months. Plus, the time to the primary bid creators get has gone from 45 to 50 days final yr to lower than a day this yr. That is additionally a aspect impact of the platform scaling — having sufficient provide and demand to facilitate fast matching and better earnings.
On the product aspect, Agentio has targeting integrating reasoning fashions and multimodal understanding. With the previous, it has constructed a marketing campaign supervisor that helps entrepreneurs craft campaigns utilizing AI, a function that’s now desk stakes throughout all advert platforms.
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Final yr, Agentio shipped an AI-powered function to match manufacturers with creators that might match their model security requirements. This yr, the corporate shipped an AI-powered content material evaluate function that may examine a draft submitted by creators and decide if it hits the temporary and is protected to add.
“Previously, brands had to assign a person to watch every single creator video to make sure they were following the campaign brief,” Meyers mentioned. “Now, our agent checks all these parameters that save time for brands and allows them to roll out and scale campaigns rapidly.”
He additionally talked about that due to AI and higher profiling of each manufacturers and creators, the corporate hasn’t needed to constrain itself to a specific kind of creator or firm. By means of their information matching, it has matched manufacturers with creators who may need been historically ignored. As an illustration, a well being complement model would sometimes work with health and wellness creators. Nevertheless, Agentio might counsel in addition they goal creators who work open air. Whereas many of the manufacturers Agentio serves are consumer-centric, the startup mentioned that it has additionally began seeing demand from organizations within the B2B house.
After spending two years largely serving YouTube, the corporate can also be beta testing Meta platforms, largely specializing in video codecs like Reels. The corporate will facilitate a connection between creators and types and use Meta partnership adverts that don’t present up on the primary feed to advertise a product or a service.
The corporate mentioned that since numerous creators on Agentio have already got a presence on social networks like Instagram, it has been in a position to scale campaigns extra simply. In 2026, it plans to help extra platforms like TikTok and Snap.
Eurie Kim, managing companion at Forerunner, mentioned that the VC agency had been monitoring Agentio for over a yr because the startup served different corporations in its portfolio.
“We’d been tracking Agentio for over a year, building a relationship with Arthur and Jonathan by introducing them to some of our biggest brands, who immediately became customers and champions of the platform. Unlocking multiple channels was a clear signal for us that Agentio could be the AI-powered media planning platform of the future, starting with the most valuable marketing asset of the future: creators,” Kim advised TechCrunch over e-mail.
Agentio mentioned that since final yr, it has scaled its staff from 12 workers to 35 workers, and it plans to extend its headcount to past 100 within the subsequent yr.
