Tano, a creator advertising platform for brands, has raised £3 million in a seed round led by Cherry Ventures bringing its total funding to £4 million alongside earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund. The round is intended to challenge the economics of the influencer agency model.
Tano's platform combines AI agents with creator strategists to manage recruitment, seeding, communication, rewards and payments across tens of thousands of relationships. Results continuously inform recruitment, support and incentives while programmes run, helping brands invest in the creators and content that perform. Tracking links and discount codes connect activity to sales, as do commerce integrations, and selected content can become paid advertising with agreed permissions. Tano operates across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, which account for more than 95% of creator spend.
Customers include Unilever, HelloFresh, Bloom & Wild and Skin+Me. Skin+Me grew creator-driven sign-ups and revenue 3.5x, with acquisition costs one-third of those in 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, and Tano estimates that sourcing the same volume manually would require 754 hours. Creator posts rose 139% and creator-driven gross merchandise value rose 113% in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the second quarter, while average cost per acquisition fell 12%.
Tano was founded by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, both creators who experienced missed opportunities and poor service when working with brands and influencer agencies. Their experience shaped the company's focus on supporting individual relationships as programmes grow. Tano will use the investment to hire engineers and creator strategists to continue improving and building out its product.
Brands should be able to set a commercial objective and invest predictably into creator advertising, just like they invest in Meta or Google. Our vision is to build the world’s largest advertising channel for commerce, powered by people. We want to harness millions of creative minds without losing the individual perspectives that make their content valuable. That is The Creator Advertising Platform we’re building.
Creator marketing has been capped by how many relationships an agency team can manage, rather than how many people have something worth saying. Will and Sagar were creators before they were founders, so they know exactly where that model breaks. 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.
