Asti Wagner is the founder and CEO of Invyted, a London-based platform designed to streamline how brands and creators collaborate. Conceived in 2021 from Asti’s own experience as a food and lifestyle creator, Invyted targets a universal pain point across the industry: the time-consuming, fragmented back-and-forth that derails simple partnerships and causes opportunities to be missed. 

Today, Invyted operates as an invite-only network where vetted creators and premium brands can coordinate gifted collaborations in minutes rather than weeks, with real-time performance tracking built in. In under three years, the company has onboarded almost 7,000 creators with a combined reach of roughly 778 million and has expanded from London to New York.

Asti’s vantage point is unusual. She grew @eatwithast from a hobby into a high-reach account while interning on the brand side at a PR agency, seeing both ends of the creator-brand handshake. That dual perspective crystallized the problem: DMs and emails multiply, briefs arrive in inconsistent formats, event invites land at the last minute, and brands struggle to find, book, and measure the right creators at scale. 

“There’s a lot of back and forth,” Asti says. “It honestly was like 40 emails back and forth” for a single hosted meal; admin that should have been a one-click booking.

She began building Invyted at age 22 after failing to find a tech tool that handled the basic logistics she and her peers needed. Early proof points came quickly: prominent hospitality and consumer brands signed on, and seasoned operators including LEON Restaurants co-founder John Vincent, former Sainsbury’s CEO Justin King, and investor Christian Angermayer backed the vision. 

Asti formally launched the app in 2023 following a period of closed testing with a few hundred creators.

As for the “why now,” Asti points to speed and scale. Invyted’s four core formats (Invites, Events, Anytime, and Gifting) turn fragmented outreach into standardized workflows, while the platform’s direct integrations with Meta and TikTok surface performance metrics automatically.

Four Collaboration Formats, One Workflow

Invites (pre-booked experiences): For collaborations that require scheduling (restaurant tables, studio visits, nail or hair appointments), creators request a date and time in-app. Brands review the creator against their criteria, confirm the booking, and the system issues confirmations and reminders. Deliverables (e.g., “two Instagram Stories” or “one TikTok”) are specified up front to remove ambiguity.

Events (group activations): From intimate menu previews to premieres and festivals, Invyted centralizes RSVPs and attendee selection. Creators request to attend; brands approve guest lists and benefit from the same logistics and reminder layer. Because everyone posts around the same time, Events are often used to generate concentrated awareness.

Anytime (walk-in, location-gated redemptions): Built for coffee chains and Quick-Service Restaurants, this format uses location services to require creators to be physically on-site to redeem a gifted item, no prior booking required. The feature reduces operational overhead for brands while capturing content from creators who are already nearby.

Gifting (ship-to-home for product brands): For beauty, fashion, and DTC offerings without a storefront, creators request a package, brands approve, and shipping details are handled in-app. As with other formats, deliverables and tracking are standardized.

Across all four, Invyted’s integrations with Meta and TikTok pull content and performance into a brand’s dashboard – Stories, Reels, TikToks, likes, shares, comments, reach, and a gallery of the posts themselves, eliminating manual collection and screenshots. 

“We can track all content shared in real time,” Asti notes, highlighting the operational savings for lean marketing teams.

Curation as a Moat

Invyted’s supply-side strategy favors quality over quantity. 

Creators must typically have 10,000+ followers to apply (a threshold Asti describes as a practical baseline for brand expectations) along with a healthy engagement rate and content in Invyted’s core verticals (food, travel, lifestyle, fashion, fitness, beauty, family). 

The team also conducts periodic manual reviews to maintain community standards. “We have actually turned away brands and influencers,” Asti says, to preserve trust on both sides. The approach has produced a network spanning mid-tier creators, including multi-million-follower talent, with growth fueled mainly by referrals, rather than paid acquisition.

That exclusivity extends to the demand side as well. Invyted prioritizes “premium” experiences and partners, an editorial layer Asti frames as a private-members-club vibe that sparks FOMO. The company has deliberately tightened onboarding criteria as it scales. 

The result, Asti argues, is a marketplace that creators want to check first and brands feel comfortable using repeatedly.

What ‘Works’ (and Why)

Across hundreds of collaborations, Asti’s takeaway is straightforward: experience quality drives outcomes. 

“The more you make the experience, the better the content,” she says. According to her, three-course tasting in an atmospheric venue gives creators angles to film and edit; a single takeaway coffee in a plain cup does not. Brands that diversify the creator mix, varying niches and audience sizes, also see more consistent results, especially given algorithmic volatility.

Asti shares two case studies to illustrate the spectrum:

First, a national fast-casual chain used Anytime to offer on-site redemptions and logged about 100 creator visits in the first week, volume that would have been impractical to coordinate manually across multiple locations.

Second, a Knightsbridge cheesecake concept listed a simple Anytime offer for its Basque cheesecake. Early creator posts went viral, triggering a cascade as more creators followed. The shop quadrupled production and temporarily paused the offer to manage queues; its Instagram following jumped from under 500 to north of 60,000-70,000.

From creators, Asti sees rising demand for clarity upfront: plain-English deliverables, who to tag, and what the brand hopes to achieve. Invyted enforces a consistent brief format to reduce confusion from scattered PDFs and long emails. 

On the brand side, two shifts stand out: openness to cross-niche creators (e.g., restaurants tapping lifestyle or fitness audiences to reach beyond “foodies”) and a return to authentic content via gifted collaborations before scaling into paid ambassadors. 

“They do want to trial and test with gifting to see if it works and if their product is ready,” says Asti.

Growth, Markets, and Measurement

Although hospitality catalyzed Invyted’s early adoption, lifestyle creators now represent the platform’s largest category by headcount, and brand demand spans beauty, fashion, entertainment, travel, and family segments alongside food and drink. 

In the United States, Invyted entered with its full four-product suite, refined from UK feedback loops. Notable brands, including Chipotle, Dunkin’, and Hilton, came aboard early, giving the team confidence to pursue more selective curation as the network scaled, according to Asti.

She stresses that measurement remains a core differentiator. As an official partner with Meta and TikTok, Invyted captures performance without creator screenshots. For brands ready to go deeper, unique links can be layered onto attribute bookings or orders, enabling them to be routed back to specific creators, but the primary value, Asti notes, lies in reliable awareness and content generation at scale.

The Challenges

Asti is candid about the steepest parts of the climb: the shift from creator to 24/7 tech operator; navigating rooms where “people don’t think I’m the founder”; and building in a segment where young female tech founders remain the exception. 

The counterweight has been a combination of formal training (a business degree), advisors, and the credibility of being a creator herself. “A lot of our clients have come because I’ve been invited initially, and then they now turn into a client,” she says.

It also helps that Asti’s operator story sits alongside creator bona fides. Her @eatwithast presence predates Invyted by years, and her résumé charts the path from social intern to founder, reinforcing the product’s “built by a creator for creators” DNA.

The Roadmap

Looking to 2026, Asti’s focus is “simplicity and scale” through the holidays, followed by product investments that make matching smarter, potentially with AI-driven recommendations layered on top of brand criteria. 

Just as important is re-positioning Invyted beyond its hospitality roots, bringing more exclusive opportunities to creators across beauty, fitness, travel, and entertainment. “We really want to nurture our community,” she says. “We don’t just want to be a tech platform.”

In summary, Invyted doesn’t try to solve every part of the influencer economy. Instead, it compresses the most failure-prone moments (discovery, booking, and measurement) into a single, curated workflow. In a market saturated with tools and spreadsheets, that specificity is the point. 

Asti’s north star remains unchanged from the problem that sparked the build: reduce friction so that better experiences produce better content at scale.

“I think that brands need to stay top of mind,” she states. “We really hope to sit at the forefront of that.”

Checkout Our Latest Podcast