A six-figure deal between two talent agencies collapsed at a dinner in Amsterdam because neither side could quickly reach the right talent manager or compile the performance data the brand needed for approval. That friction, Sapir Tori recalls, was one in a series of moments that convinced her the Influencer Marketing industry had a problem no one had built around. 

Sapir is the founder and CEO of Zano, a marketplace she launched in January 2025 to connect talent agencies, marketing agencies, and brands through a shared discovery layer. The platform now lists more than 400 talent agencies representing over 6,000 creators, with participants including UTA, Viral Nation, and Fixated. According to Sapir, brands and agencies have already facilitated more than $500,000 in campaign value. 

“Influencer Marketing is worth over $30 billion, and it’s just going up,” she says. “Most of that money is attributed to deals handled by talent agencies. Yet their workflow is so fragmented, they’re still working off old models.”

Sapir came to the problem from inside it. A New York native who has lived and worked across Israel, China, Los Angeles, and the Netherlands, she spent more than a decade in high-tech sales, financial analysis at Intel Corporation, and UX design before joining a talent and marketing agency in 2023 as fractional COO. There, she helped scale operations from a one-person shop to a full team and watched firsthand as the agency managed relationships with partner agencies through spreadsheets and informal contact lists. She designed a solution, originally only for internal use, and realized quickly it had wider appeal. Her first LinkedIn post about the concept drew more than 100 agencies to a waitlist within a week.

“When I explained it to agencies, they didn’t have any resistance,” Sapir says. “The good agencies are willing to expose who they represent. They’re not trying to hide it. They just want to get deals for their people.”

The Manual Problem at the Center of Influencer Marketing

The fragmented workflow Sapir observed was not specific to a single agency. Influencer Marketing firms routinely partner with other agencies to source talent outside their own rosters, matching clients with creators specialized in different niches or geographies. Coordinating those partnerships meant manually updating spreadsheets and maintaining informal contact lists.

“A lot of the time, things were missed,” Sapir says. “It wasn’t in one central place that was easily extractable.”

The Amsterdam dinner illustrated the cost. A deal worth six figures, in negotiation for more than two months, ultimately fell through partly because the parties spent weeks reconciling information they could have accessed faster. “If the agency knew who the other one represented and had the data earlier on,” Sapir says, “it would have saved the whole situation at least two weeks.”

Before landing on discovery as the core problem, she had considered building a CRM for talent agencies, getting far enough to design a prototype in Figma before abandoning it. “It was hard to admit it at the time, but the more customer research I did, the more I realized I was trying to force a solution instead of solving a problem people were truly desperate to fix,” she says. Discovery, in her assessment, was the more defensible and scalable bet.

Two Entry Points, One Vetted Network

Zano’s marketplace operates through two distinct products. The first, Casting, allows brands and marketing agencies to post a casting call that details the campaign brief, budget, influencer requirements, and performance requirements. That casting call then gets broadcast immediately to all the talent agencies listed on the platform. Talent agencies then submit relevant creators from their rosters, along with custom quotes and context for each submission. The requesting party receives all submissions in a single table, with live social data attached to each profile.

The second tier, Marketplace, gives approved brands and marketing agencies direct search access to the full database, allowing filters by agency, exclusive representation, niche, location, follower count, average views, and keyword text search.

Every talent agency that joins is vetted personally by Sapir before being listed. “I still personally review every agency,” she says. “Knowing who’s on the marketplace and maintaining that level of quality is important to me.” That vetting has caught at least one bad actor: a contact presenting itself as a legitimate agency that turned out to have no actual representation relationships. “They were flat out pretending to be a well-known talent agency, but they weren’t,” she says.

Unrepresented creators are excluded from direct listing. Multiple influencers have requested the ability to add their own profiles, and Sapir has declined each time. “At this time, we are strictly limiting the listings to talent agencies because we want to make our mission very clear,” she says. “There are more than enough incredible platforms out there that help direct influencer to brand.”

Trust Has More Layers Than the Industry Acknowledges

At Cannes Lions 2026, Sapir spoke on a panel focused on trust in the Creator Economy. The conversation in that context typically centers on the relationship between a creator and their audience. Her contribution reframed the problem.

“What the audience sees is the post,” she says. “That’s the aftermath. There’s so much more that goes into the works before that.”

Her framework identifies four distinct trust relationships in a typical influencer deal: between the creator and their audience; between the creator and their talent agency; between the talent agency and the marketing agency representing the brand; and between the marketing agency and the brand itself.

At the creator-audience level, Sapir says trust is under pressure. Some influencers are accepting deals indiscriminately, prioritizing revenue over audience alignment. “The influencers that last are the ones that don’t sell out for deals that don’t align with their branding,” she says. 

The stronger performers hold to a different standard and see the benefit of adding multiple touch points in their audience’s lives. “Charli D’Amelio is a great example,” Sapir notes. “She didn’t just build trust through dance videos on TikTok. She reinforced it through her TV show, podcast, products, and brand partnerships. Every positive touchpoint strengthened her relationship with her audience.”

Between agencies, she says trust is improving. The more pressing accountability shift, in her view, is on the brand side. Influencers and agencies are increasingly vocal when brands fail to pay on time, and the reputational cost is real. “The brands that continue to lowball creators and not pay them on time get a very bad reputation on our side of the table,” she says. 

An Agency Boom With a Quality Problem

Sapir notes that the barriers to launching a talent agency have dropped in recent years. She sees genuine benefits from that shift. For brands and marketing agencies, more professional intermediaries have raised the quality of deal flow. For creators, a talent manager removes the operational burden of handling negotiations and opens doors to opportunities they might not have identified independently.

“With a talent agent, the influencer has more time,” she says. “They’re just focusing on their content.”

But the expansion has also introduced a quality problem. “The more players there are, the more sharks in the water,” she says. Some agencies, in her observation, are chasing volume rather than building long-term relationships. “The quality has definitely gone a little bit down.” 

She expects the market to self-correct, with committed operators building durable businesses and opportunistic ones exiting when deal flow dries up. That dynamic informs Zano’s vetting posture. “We have to be very careful with who we let into the ecosystem,” she says.

Building the Go-To When Someone Asks Who Represents an Influencer

Sapir’s target for the remainder of 2026 is to reach 800 talent agencies on the platform, nearly double the current count. She expects growth to come primarily through referrals from existing users, with awareness rather than outbound sales as the limiting factor.

Two product developments are in progress. The first is in-platform live chat, designed to let agencies and brands negotiate directly through Zano rather than being redirected to external email. The second is AI-assisted content categorization.

“Zano currently centralizes talent agency rosters into one searchable database,” Sapir says. “Our next step is adding AI-powered discovery to help brands find the right creators faster by understanding their content, surfacing relevant themes, and identifying creators who have naturally talked about a product or category before.”

A separate AI partnership for talent agencies is in development, with an announcement expected in the coming months.

“When you think, ‘Who represents that influencer?'” Sapir concludes, “I want people to try to find them on Zano.”

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