Agentio Raises $40M From Forerunner to Expand Creator Marketplace Beyond YouTube
▼ Summary
– YouTube sponsored video views grew 28% year-on-year while sponsored video volume increased 54% in early 2025, with creator ad spend potentially outperforming traditional media.
– Agentio raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Forerunner Ventures, bringing total funding to $56 million and valuing the company at $340 million.
– Brands using Agentio achieved significantly better results, with Bombas seeing 5.3x higher return on ad spend and 90% new customer rates compared to other platforms.
– The platform uses AI to automate creator-brand matching and content review, reducing brand approval time from weeks to hours while helping creators double partnership earnings within six months.
– Agentio is expanding beyond YouTube to beta test on Meta platforms and plans to support TikTok and Snap in 2026 while growing its team from 35 to over 100 employees.
The creator economy is experiencing explosive growth, with sponsored video views on YouTube surging 28% year-over-year and the actual number of sponsored videos increasing by a remarkable 54% in the first half of 2025. This powerful trend, where advertising expenditure through creator channels now frequently surpasses traditional media investments, has fueled significant investor confidence in platforms that facilitate these partnerships.
Capitalizing on this momentum, Agentio has successfully secured a $40 million Series B funding round. This latest investment was spearheaded by Forerunner Ventures, with continued support from previous backers including Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line. This financing round, the company’s third in as many years, elevates Agentio’s total capital raised to $56 million and places its valuation at $340 million.
Founded in 2023 by CEO Arthur Leopold, previously president of talent marketplace Cameo, and CTO Jonathan Meyers, an ex-Spotify engineer, Agentio has demonstrated rapid expansion. The company has grown fivefold since its last funding announcement in November 2024.
The platform delivers compelling results for its brand partners. For instance, apparel company Bombas reported a 5.3 times better return on ad spend and a 90% rate of new customer acquisition through Agentio campaigns compared to other video advertising platforms. The company also highlights that brands which typically take over six months to allocate budgets on Meta and Google can deploy those funds in just a few months on its platform, achieving superior returns.
Leopold explained the core mission, stating that the historical challenge for brands was scaling creator partnerships effectively. “Our founding principle was to leverage AI for automating the ad buying process, ensuring brands achieve optimal outcomes,” he said. “With the rise of AI-generated content, brands are increasingly recognizing that the authentic trust creators build with their audiences is an unbeatable asset.”
While specific financials were not disclosed, Agentio confirmed it has distributed tens of millions of dollars to creators. The platform has enabled creators to more than double their earnings from brand deals within six months of joining. Furthermore, the average wait time for a creator to receive their first bid has dramatically decreased from 45-50 days last year to under a single day today, a direct benefit of the platform’s growing scale and efficient matching of supply with demand.
On the technological front, Agentio has integrated advanced reasoning models and multimodal AI understanding. This includes a campaign manager that assists marketers in designing campaigns, a feature that is becoming standard in modern advertising tools. The company also launched an AI-powered system to pair brands with creators who align with their safety standards, followed by an AI content review feature. This tool analyzes creator-submitted drafts to verify they meet the campaign brief and are appropriate for publishing.
Meyers emphasized the efficiency gains, noting, “Before, brands needed a person to review every single video. Now, our AI agent handles all these checks, saving significant time and enabling brands to launch and scale campaigns much faster.”
He added that sophisticated AI and data profiling allow the company to look beyond conventional creator-brand matches. For example, a health supplement brand might traditionally partner only with fitness influencers, but Agentio’s system could successfully suggest collaborations with outdoor adventure creators. Although most clients are consumer-focused brands, the startup is beginning to see interest from B2B organizations as well.
After two years of primarily operating on YouTube, Agentio is now beta testing its services on Meta platforms, concentrating on video formats like Reels. The company will manage the connection between creators and brands, utilizing Meta’s partnership ads that appear outside the main feed to promote products. Given that many Agentio creators are already active on Instagram, scaling campaigns has been a natural progression. Support for additional platforms such as TikTok and Snap is planned for 2026.
Eurie Kim, Forerunner’s Managing Partner, noted that her firm had been observing Agentio’s progress for over a year, having introduced the platform to several of its portfolio companies. “We built a relationship with Arthur and Jonathan by connecting them with our major brands, who quickly became customers and advocates,” Kim shared. “Their expansion into multiple channels signaled that Agentio has the potential to become the AI-powered media planning platform of the future, built around the most valuable marketing asset: creators.”
To support its ambitious growth, Agentio has expanded its team from 12 to 35 employees over the past year and intends to grow its headcount to over 100 within the next twelve months.
(Source: TechCrunch)
