Tano, a UK company that uses AI agents to find, sign and pay creators for brands, has raised a $4m seed round led by Cherry Ventures. The way it charges is the more interesting part. Brands generally pay either per creator post that goes live or a share of affiliate revenue, with some larger clients on a flat fee.
That pricing ties Tano's income to sales as well as content, and it means the company competes with affiliate networks, not only with influencer software such as CreatorIQ and Aspire or with agencies. Business Insider first reported the round.
Founded in 2025 by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, described as part-time creators (Caplan runs a tech and science TikTok account), Tano has now raised $5m in total, with earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund. Its clients include Unilever, HelloFresh, Lovable, Skin+Me and Bloom & Wild.
The agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, listen to audio and read comment-section sentiment to vet creators. They then handle the conversation from first contact through contract to payment. Once a post is live, Tano tracks whether it drives clicks or sales and suggests which posts to boost with paid ads, feeding results back into its recommendations.
"A brand should be able to come to a creator advertising platform and allocate their budget and the intent," Caplan said.
Scale has a cost for creators
Tano says its agents talk to more than 5,000 creators a month, and that one consumer goods client's programme took 25 times fewer hours than running it by hand. Both are company figures, not audited results.
The model shifts more of the risk onto creators. Where a brand pays a share of affiliate revenue, the creator's fee is likely to depend on sales tracked through a link or code, rather than an agreed rate for the post. Tano has not said how it splits that revenue with creators, what it takes, or how it handles attribution when a post is boosted with paid media.
The trade-off sits against what creators and agencies have long argued makes the channel work. "Audiences are always drawn to effort, to honesty, to storytelling," Becky Owen, then global chief marketing officer at Billion Dollar Boy, told Hello Partner in November 2025.
Tano joins other attempts to automate the deal itself, from No Logo's AI talent manager Lola to Ogilvy's Echo. IAB UK has said UK creator ad spend will pass £1bn this year.
The money will go on compute and on growing its engineering and creator strategist teams.
For UK creators, the first approach for a brand deal may increasingly come from software, and the fee may rest on sales they did not set the terms for. For brands, the question to ask any platform like this is who it works for when its pay depends on the same sales as the creator's.
