Today, we’re announcing that Agentio has raised a $40 million Series B led by Forerunner, with continued backing from Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp and other leading investors. This brings our total capital raised to $56 million and values the company at $340 million – just 2 years after launching our platform and following 5x year-over-year growth.
This is a story about a fundamental shift in how advertising works – and how Agentio is building the infrastructure to power it at scale.
To our team, our brand and creator partners, our investors and supporters: thank you. This funding, our growth, and our vision is only possible because of our world-class, customer-obsessed, insatiably curious, and wildly ambitious team, and our partners who believe deeply in Agentio. We’re hiring world-class engineers and GTM operators who want to build infrastructure for an $800B market being created in real-time. Come build with us.
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The Problem: An $800B Opportunity That Couldn’t Scale
Attention has moved to creators. Consumers don’t find relevance in banner ads or traditional advertising – they trust the people they follow, whose recommendations feel authentic, whose content they actively choose to watch. The creator economy is projected to reach $500 billion by 2027. Unilever’s CEO recently stated that 50% of their marketing budget will shift to creators. 94% of Gen Z trust influencer recommendations more than traditional ads, and 77% have made purchases based on creator recommendations. The signal couldn’t be clearer.
Yet despite creators’ outsized influence on purchasing decisions, less than 2% of digital ad spend has shifted to creators today.
Why? Because executing creator advertising has been fundamentally broken and impossible to scale.
Every campaign required weeks or months of manual work: finding the right creators, negotiating individual deals, managing contracts, coordinating content approvals, measuring performance across inconsistent data. Marketing teams could manage maybe a few dozen creator partnerships per quarter. Scale to hundreds or thousands? Impossible without an army of people handling spreadsheets, email threads, and manual tracking.
The math was brutal: creator advertising consistently outperformed traditional digital channels by 3-5x, but brands could typically only allocate ~2% of their budgets to it because the infrastructure to scale simply didn’t exist.
Brands recognized the opportunity but couldn’t operationalize it at the scale their budgets demanded. Creators wanted access to the $800 billion in paid media spend (versus the ~$10 billion of brand dollars currently flowing to them), but couldn’t navigate the fragmented, manual process.
Before Agentio, both sides wanted this shift to happen. Neither could make it work. This is the gap we built Agentio to close. It’s why Forbes recently named us one of the Next Billion Dollar Startups.
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