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.