Social is now the best way to sell, yet the most painful way to do it. Influencer and affiliate marketing has become a core growth channel for ecommerce brands, and spend in the category is growing faster than anywhere else in marketing.

But the work behind it still runs on spreadsheets and fragmented tools. Brands either build expensive in-house teams or pay agencies 25-30% fees, so most campaigns stop at a handful of creators, even though smaller creators are often closer to their audiences and make up most of the opportunity.

Tano wants to replace the influencer agency. Agencies have only ever explored the version of creator marketing a team of people can manage, and Tano does that job with agents, so it scales like software.

That's why we're leading Tano's $4M seed round, bringing its total funding to $5M alongside earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

What Tano is building

Tano is The Creator Advertising Platform. AI agents work alongside creator strategists to run recruitment, seeding, communication, rewards and payments across tens of thousands of creator relationships on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube - platforms that account for more than 95% of creator spend. Tracking links, discount codes and commerce integrations tie that activity to sales, and results feed straight back into which creators get recruited and supported while a programme runs. Selected content can become paid advertising with agreed permissions.

It's already working for brands including Unilever, HelloFresh, Bloom & Wild and Skin+Me. Skin+Me grew creator-driven sign-ups and revenue 3.5x, at a third of the acquisition cost of its other channels. Bloom & Wild saw creator-led paid ads deliver 125% higher click-through rates and 13% higher return on ad spend. HelloFresh achieved a 93% uplift in conversion rate, with new customer acquisition increasing by 5x since the start of the year. In one programme, Tano's AI agents sourced and validated 2,358 creators using only two hours of brand influencer-expert time - work Tano estimates would have taken 754 hours by hand.

Brands need more creative than ever as search traffic falls and paid channels get more expensive, and AI-generated ads still underperform content from real people.

Why we backed Tano

We pre-empted this round: Will and Sagar never even had a pitch deck. When we visited their London office, we sat down for two hours to talk through growth. Afterwards, the team opened a laptop and showed us everything that had happened autonomously while we were talking. It's a truly agentic company.

Will and Sagar met through an Instagram DM, and between them they cover the creator, engineering and data sides of the business. Will was an early employee at Encord, helping scale a data company through its high-growth phase, while helping his sister grow her Instagram to 200,000 followers. Sagar is a software engineer, previously at Let’s Do This and Holly, whose own engineering videos on TikTok and YouTube have drawn millions of views. Both have sat on the creator side of a brand deal, so they know exactly where the agency model breaks, and they have the data and engineering backgrounds to rebuild it.

Many in our community may already know them from the stage at our Cherry Summit, and they still build Tano in public on the same platforms their customers advertise on. Tano is building the platform where the next wave of ad spend will go, and we think it will become one of the biggest in commerce.

As Will puts it, "Brands should be able to set a commercial objective and invest predictably into creator advertising, just like they invest in Meta or Google."

While marketing tech hasn't produced many great exits, we think that's because influencer marketing hasn't been solved yet. It’s something we’re seeing across our portfolio: with agents, work that used to need a services firm can be built as software, and the company that owns the outcome grows like one.

Before agents, a business like this would have been a consultancy. Now it can be software. Influencer spend is around $30B today, inside a $650B digital ad market, and it's growing fast. We think Tano can make creator marketing as programmatic as Google Ads, then grow from there into an agentic CMO that rebalances spend across all of marketing.

Every programme Tano runs adds to a graph of which creators drive real sales. As AI-generated influencers flood the feeds, that data becomes the way brands tell trusted creators from cheap copies.

We also love backing companies that are great places to work. Tano's London team is high-energy and committed, hosting influencer events, and that shows up for customers and hires alike.