Technology

Creator-Founded Influencer Platform Tano Raises $4M to Automate Brand Campaigns

Published on November 12, 2026

Tano, a UK-based Influencer Marketing platform started by two part-time creators, has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, the company told Business Insider. The round brings Tano’s total funding to $5 million, following earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund.

Founded in 2025 by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, Tano pairs AI agents with human creator strategists. Its agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, listening to audio and analyzing comment-section sentiment to vet and recommend creators for a brand, according to the company.

The agents handle creator communication from recruitment through contracts and payments. The platform tracks when posts go live and whether they drive actions such as website clicks or sales, then suggests the best-performing posts for brands to boost with paid advertising. The data feeds back into Tano’s recommendation algorithm in a “recursive loop” similar to Meta’s ad platform.

Caplan, who runs a tech and science-focused TikTok account, said the company plans to spend the new capital on compute and on growing its engineering and creator strategist teams.

“A brand should be able to come to a creator advertising platform and allocate their budget and the intent, and then they should be able to return, just like you go onto Meta, and put in your budget. You put in your campaign objective, and Meta does all the messy work behind the scenes, and then gives you a return,” Caplan said.

Tano’s clients have included Unilever, HelloFresh, Lovable, Skin+Me, and Bloom & Wild. The company generally charges brands per creator post that goes live, or a share of affiliate revenue. Some larger clients prefer a flat fee. Tano competes with creator marketing software platforms such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, influencer agencies, and affiliate networks.

Tano’s pitch deck frames new ad channels as moving through three stages: bought by hand, bought via agencies, and bought through software. It describes Influencer Marketing as “stuck at stage two.” According to the deck, Tano’s agents communicate with more than 5,000 creators a month, and one consumer goods client ran a creator program that Tano says required “25 times fewer hours than doing it by hand.”