Cherry Ventures backs Tano with $4M to challenge the traditional influencer agency model

Creator advertising
platform Tano has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Cherry Ventures, bringing its total funding to $5 million following earlier backing
from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

Founded by Will Caplan and
Sagar Shah, Tano develops an AI-powered platform designed to help brands manage
creator partnerships and turn influencer marketing into a more scalable and
measurable advertising channel.

As consumer attention
increasingly shifts towards content creators, brands are investing more in
influencer marketing to reach audiences and drive sales. However, managing
large numbers of creator partnerships remains complex and resource-intensive,
requiring brands to identify suitable creators, coordinate campaigns, manage
payments and measure performance. Traditional agency models can make smaller
partnerships particularly expensive, limiting opportunities to work with a
broader network of creators.

Tano aims to address these
challenges by combining AI agents with creator strategists to streamline
different stages of creator advertising. Its platform handles creator
recruitment, product seeding, communication, rewards and payments, allowing
brands to run ongoing campaigns across thousands of relationships rather than
relying on individual partnerships.

The system also uses
campaign performance data to improve creator selection and engagement over
time. Through tracking links, discount codes and commerce integrations, brands
can measure the impact of creator activity on sales, while selected content can
be repurposed for paid advertising with the necessary permissions.

Will Caplan, co-founder
and CEO of Tano, said:

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.

The new funding will be
used to hire additional engineers and creator strategists, supporting further
development and improvement of Tano’s platform as the company works to scale
its creator advertising operations.