The creator economy may be marching toward a projected $500 billion by 2027, but its advertising backbone has long been stuck in the pre-automation era. Brands know creators drive purchase decisions, yet only 2% of digital ad spend flows to them—mainly because creator advertising has remained painfully manual: individual negotiations, inconsistent performance data, and workflows that collapse under volume.
Agentio, the AI-native platform built for creator-led advertising, says it’s finally solved that bottleneck. The company just raised a $40 million Series B, led by Forerunner, with additional backing from Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line. The round brings Agentio’s total capital raised to $56 million and its valuation to $340 million.
Agentio’s pitch is straightforward but transformative: turn creator advertising into something that can scale like search and paid social—complete with automation, measurement, and real-time optimization. And if its growth numbers are any indication, the market was waiting for exactly this.
Why Creator Advertising Hasn’t Scaled—Until Now
Despite creators being some of the most trusted voices online, the workflows behind creator campaigns have historically been more cottage industry than enterprise-grade. A single mid-sized activation could require dozens of emails, contract cycles, rate negotiations, and approvals—hardly the stuff CMOs can scale across hundreds of creators.
Agentio’s founders argue that the missing piece wasn’t demand or creator supply—it was infrastructure.
“Advertising follows attention, and attention has moved to creators,” said CEO Arthur Leopold. “What’s been missing is infrastructure that lets brands scale creator programs the way they scale search and social campaigns.”
Agentio’s new funding is meant to accelerate that infrastructure globally and across platforms, effectively making creators a native part of enterprise media planning.
Inside Agentio’s AI Engine: Automating the Entire Creator Lifecycle
The company’s secret weapon is a fully automated, AI-driven workflow that handles every step of creator advertising:
- Creator-brand matching across tens of thousands of creators
- Content briefing and brand safety
- Bids, contracting, and approvals
- Payment automation
- Real-time performance measurement
Marketers can even train custom AI agents using natural language instructions, which then translate strategy ideas into fully contracted creator campaigns in minutes.
CTO Jonathan Meyers explains the breakthrough: “Previous attempts to scale creator advertising required armies of people negotiating individual deals. AI changes that. What once took weeks can now happen automatically.”
This is not hypothetical. In 2025, more than 100 enterprise brands—including Uber, DoorDash, CashApp, Tecovas, and Olipop—shifted tens of millions of paid media dollars into creator campaigns built entirely on Agentio’s system.
The Two-Sided Network: What Brands and Creators Actually Get
Agentio functions as a network on both sides:
Brands get:
- Programmatic-style control over creator campaigns
- Automated campaign setup and execution
- Standardized measurement across creators and platforms
- Faster creative cycles
- The ability to scale from a handful of creators to hundreds
Creators get:
- Automatic matching with enterprise brands
- Eliminated back-and-forth negotiations
- Predictable workflows and payment automation
- A bigger share of enterprise media budgets
The platform’s momentum is notable. Agentio reports 5x+ year-over-year growth, and brands say ROI is exceeding their best digital channels. Bombas, for example, achieved 5.3x better ROAS from Agentio-run creator campaigns compared to comparable digital video buys.
The Industry Context: Search, Social… and Now Creators
The analogies coming from investors are telling.
“Forerunner believes Agentio is doing for creators what Google did for search and Meta did for social,” said Eurie Kim, Managing Partner. And she’s not alone. The comparison is rooted in the idea that creators represent a massive attention center—but one that hasn’t yet been systematized into a performance-marketing engine.
Creators aren’t replacing search or social. But they are quickly becoming a third pillar—an influential channel that sits somewhere between branding, commerce, and entertainment.
Brands in Forerunner’s portfolio—Warby Parker, Away, Chime, The Farmer’s Dog—have already adopted these scaled creator programs, signaling a broader shift toward creators as a core paid channel rather than an experimental one.
Case Studies: From Months of Coordination to Days of Deployment
Olipop’s comments sum up the value proposition clearly.
“Agentio completely transformed our YouTube creator strategy,” said Steven Vigilante, Director of Media & Partnerships. What previously required months of coordination for a handful of creators now takes days—and delivers measurable ROI.
For many brands, the ability to run creator campaigns with the same velocity as paid social changes the economics of creator marketing entirely. It shifts creators from a long-tail tactical channel into a scalable, strategic one.
What the Series B Funding Means for 2026 and Beyond
Agentio plans to use the new investment to:
- Strengthen its AI infrastructure
- Expand beyond YouTube into Meta Partnership Ads and new platforms
- Grow from 35 employees to over 100 in 2026
- Deepen its creator network and global reach
And in a move that feels symbolically perfect, the company recently added Rhett & Link—hosts of Good Mythical Morning and long-time creator economy heavyweights—as advisors after seeing strong revenue expansion through Agentio.
Their involvement signals something bigger: creators aren’t just participants in this shift—they’re starting to shape the infrastructure powering it.
Why This Matters for the Future of Digital Advertising
If Agentio succeeds, the consequences will be sweeping:
- Creator spend will no longer be capped by manual labor.
- Enterprise brands will treat creators as a core media channel, not an experimental one.
- Ad budgets will follow attention more efficiently, accelerating the shift from social feeds to creator-led formats.
- Creators will access enterprise budgets without the complexity that previously limited scale.
The creator economy didn’t need more influence—it needed a system.
Agentio believes it’s building exactly that.
