AI Platform Agentio Secures $40M to Scale Creator-Brand Partnerships

AI-powered creator advertising platform Agentio has closed a $40 million Series B funding round led by Forerunner, with participation from Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line. The investment brings the company's total funding to $56 million and values it at $340 million—impressive numbers for a startup founded just two years ago in 2023.

The timing reflects a broader shift in digital advertising, where brands are increasingly moving budgets away from traditional channels and into creator-led campaigns. For creators, this signals something more tangible: the infrastructure connecting them to enterprise advertising budgets is maturing, and fast.

What is Agentio?

Agentio is an AI-native platform that automates the entire lifecycle of creator-brand partnerships. Think of it as a two-sided marketplace where brands can launch creator campaigns at scale, and creators get direct access to enterprise advertising budgets without the usual back-and-forth negotiations.

Founded in 2023 by Arthur Leopold (former president at Cameo) and Jonathan Meyers (ex-Spotify engineer), the platform tackles what has historically been the biggest bottleneck in creator marketing: the manual, time-consuming process of finding the right creators, negotiating deals, managing contracts, and tracking performance.

What used to take weeks or months now happens in hours—or even minutes.

The interesting part? Agentio doesn't just match brands with obvious choices. Its AI looks beyond vertical specificity. A health supplement brand might typically target fitness creators, but Agentio's system could identify a creator discussing an upcoming move as a perfect match for a rewards program focused on rent payments. The platform prioritizes genuine creator enthusiasm over demographic checkboxes.

Also read: Visa’s New AI Tools Signal the Creator Economy’s Coming Professional Era

Why This Matters for Creators

For creators tired of chasing brand deals that go nowhere, Agentio's growth suggests a shift in how monetization actually works.

The platform has already paid out tens of millions of dollars to creators. More importantly, creators joining Agentio have been able to more than double their brand partnership earnings within six months of signing up.

The speed has changed dramatically too. Last year, creators waited 45-50 days to receive their first brand opportunity through the platform. This year? Less than 24 hours.

This isn't just about faster payments—it's about consistent access to enterprise budgets. Over 100 brands including Uber, DoorDash, CashApp, and Olipop have shifted tens of millions in ad spend to creator campaigns through Agentio in 2025 alone. That's real money flowing into the creator economy, not just promises.

CEO Arthur Leopold puts it simply: "The challenge historically before Agentio was for brands to partner with creators at scale. Our belief since we founded the company has been to use AI to automate the ad buying process for brands to get the best outcomes."

The Funding Details

The $40 million Series B round was led by Forerunner, with backing from Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line. This brings Agentio's total capital raised to $56 million and values the company at $340 million.

The growth has been aggressive. Since its last funding round in November 2024, Agentio has scaled fivefold. The team has grown from 12 employees to 35, and the company plans to triple that to over 100 employees by 2026.

Several Forerunner portfolio companies—including Warby Parker, Away, Chime, and The Farmer's Dog—are already running creator programs on Agentio's platform.

Eurie Kim, Managing Partner of Forerunner, explains the investment thesis: "Creators have become one of the most powerful forces shaping consumer behavior, but the infrastructure to support them hasn't kept pace. Just as Google and Meta built platforms to unlock search and social, Agentio is building the infrastructure needed for creator-led ad development and monetization at scale."

The company recently added Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal—the duo behind Good Mythical Morning, the most-watched daily morning show on the internet—as advisors after growing their branded revenue through the platform.

What's Next for Agentio

The Series B funding will primarily go toward expanding beyond YouTube. Agentio is currently beta testing Meta Partnership Ads, focusing on video formats like Reels. The goal is to give creators access to brand budgets across multiple platforms, not just one.

CTO Jonathan Meyers highlights what's changed: "Every previous attempt to scale creator advertising required armies of people negotiating individual deals. What's changed is that AI can now automate the manual administrative tasks that once took weeks or months."

The company is also advancing its AI infrastructure, particularly in reasoning models and multimodal understanding. This means better campaign matching, faster creator identification, and smarter brand safety controls.

For context, the timing makes sense. Sponsored videos on YouTube saw a 28% increase in views year-over-year in the first half of 2025, while the number of sponsored videos grew 54%. Brands like Bombas have reported 5.3x better return on ad spend from Agentio campaigns compared to traditional digital video ads.

CEO Arthur Leopold's vision is clear: "Brands can now build creator programs on Agentio that run at the scale of their paid media budgets. This new funding will allow us to expand that infrastructure globally and across platforms, unlocking the movement of hundreds of billions of dollars into the creator economy."

Also read: Study: People Now Get News From Creators, Not News Outlets