London marketing technology company Tano has raised $4m to expand an AI-powered advertising platform designed to help brands manage larger networks of online content creators without proportionately increasing their marketing teams.
The seed investment was led by European venture capital company Cherry Ventures and brings Tano’s total funding to $5m, including earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.
Tano combines artificial intelligence agents with human marketing specialists to manage creator selection, outreach, commercial negotiations, campaign administration, and performance measurement.
The company will use the financing to invest in computing resources and expand its engineering and creator strategy teams.
Founded in 2025 by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, the business is seeking to automate activities that have traditionally required substantial administrative work by marketing agencies and in-house advertising teams.
Both founders previously worked as content creators. Caplan, the company’s chief executive, produced technology and science content, while chief technology officer Shah operated a YouTube channel focused on aerospace engineering.
Their experience negotiating commercial partnerships helped inform a platform intended to simplify the management of creator advertising campaigns.
Tano’s software identifies potential creators, manages communication and contractual arrangements, and uses campaign results to inform subsequent advertising decisions. Human specialists remain involved in strategy and relationship management.
The company works with consumer brands including HelloFresh, Skin+Me, Bloom & Wild, and Papier.
Reducing campaign administration —
Creator advertising has become an established marketing channel, but managing campaigns can involve identifying suitable individuals, reviewing content, negotiating fees, processing payments, and measuring results across numerous separate accounts.
These requirements become more demanding when advertisers seek to work with hundreds or thousands of smaller creators rather than a limited number of high-profile influencers.
Tano’s approach is intended to reduce the administrative cost of those relationships, allowing brands to organise campaigns involving a larger number of participants.
Its platform searches a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, according to the company, and uses information about audience engagement and previous campaign results to support recommendations.
Campaign performance can be monitored through links, commerce integrations, and other measurement tools intended to connect advertising activity with customer transactions.
However, the commercial performance of creator advertising remains dependent on the reliability of attribution methods, the quality of individual campaigns, and how businesses measure the contribution of marketing to sales.
Tano reports that more than 65% of creators who published content for its clients during 2026 participated in subsequent campaigns, averaging 5.3 posts for the same brand.
The company also reports that its work with HelloFresh increased conversion rates by 93%, while campaigns for Papier generated a 34% improvement in return on advertising spend.
Those results relate to individual customer campaigns and have not been independently established as representative of the wider creator advertising market.
Dinika Mahtani, partner at Cherry Ventures, said: “Creator marketing has been capped by how many relationships an agency team can manage, rather than how many people have something worth saying.”
The investment follows growing demand for technology that can automate repetitive marketing processes while leaving campaign strategy and creative decisions under human supervision.
Tano plans to expand its technical infrastructure and specialist teams as it develops the platform for larger advertising programmes, using performance data to inform creator selection and subsequent spending decisions.
