• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 1, 2023

Agentio has built an AI-powered platform for creators to sell ad slots to brands, with a $4.25 million seed investment. It is now publicly available.

The company’s round of financing, co-led by Craft Ventures and AlleyCorp, also had participation from additional institutional investors Antler, Protagonist, and Permanent Capital.

“We want to be able to drive more digital ad spend to the creator space,” said Arthur Leopold, CEO of Agentio and former president of the celebrity video-sharing app Cameo. “Brands today are somewhat constrained, but if we can make it as easy for a brand to partner with a creator as buying a Facebook ad, then we could shift a meaningful portion of the $300 billion digital ad spend to the creator space and ad channel.”

Leopold, along with Jonathan Meyers -- who is CTO and a former engineer at Spotify who supported the build of the platform's automated marketing solutions -- founded the company.

Agentio began bringing brands on board last month. Marketers are provided with features like the ability to approve creators participating in a campaign and to review advertising scripts prior to their live deployment.

The platform’s interface resembles aspects of programmatic buying, and works as a demand-side platform (DSP) and supply-side platform (SSP), similar to a YouTube creator ad network. It was built this way to make it intuitive as possible.

A media buyer would log in to see how campaigns are performing. Run dates are set, along with a monthly budget and target CPM. Initially the platform will run on a CPM basis, but support for cost per acquisition is in the works. Placement is also set, along with targeted audiences. Full automation is simplified with the strike of a switch.

A creator shares in the platform upcoming videos they will post on YouTube. In the video, the creator might have room for a 60-second ads.

The process today is manual, but Agentio is changing that. When a brand turns on a campaign, they will automatically bid on ad space from that creator.

The platform has a strong understanding of the creator based on the content they have produced in the past.

Agentio takes 20% of the ad spend as a platform fee, which Leopold said is similar to The Trade Desk. Leopold and Meyers said they wanted to make it “as easy as buying a Facebook ad or Google ad.”

It does not run auctions for ad inventory and is not integrated with outside demand-side or supply-side partners -- instead functioning as a platform for direct buys with YouTube creators.

YouTube creators wanting to automate ads sell programmatic ad slots through Google AdSense, which is only compatible with pre-roll and mid-roll video. Host-read ads in the video content can’t be sold through AdSense.