Tano raises £3m to make creator marketing a performance channel

Tano raised a £3m seed round led by Cherry Ventures, taking total funding to £4m alongside earlier backers Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

The startup lets brands buy creator marketing the way they buy Meta or Google ads: set a budget and objectives, and Tano's AI agents handle recruitment, seeding, communication and payments with creators at scale. Its pitch is that creator marketing has long been hard to predict, measure and scale, leaving brands defaulting to paid social, and that AI agents now make a more programmatic approach viable, including working economically with much smaller creators.

"Brands should be able to set a commercial objective and invest predictably into creator advertising, just like they invest in Meta or Google," said co-founder and CEO Will Caplan, who founded Tano with Sagar Shah. "Our vision is to build the world's largest advertising channel for commerce, powered by people."

The timing rides a fast-growing category: US brands spent $29.5bn on creators in 2024, with 2026 forecast near $44bn. Tano says it now speaks to tens of thousands of creators a month and counts Unilever, HelloFresh, Bloom & Wild and Skin+Me among its customers, pointing to results like a 125% higher click-through rate for Bloom & Wild.

"Creator marketing has been capped by how many relationships an agency team can manage, rather than how many people have something worth saying," said Dinika Mahtani, partner at Cherry Ventures. "Tano is building the platform where the next wave of ad spend will go."