According to a report from Tubefilter, the number of sponsored video views on YouTube increased by 28% year-over-year in the first half of 2025, and the number of sponsored videos increased by 54% year-over-year. Additionally, ad spend through creator channels is steadily increasing and in some cases even outperforming traditional media.
Buoyed by these signals, Agentio, a startup that connects brands and YouTube creators with sponsored videos, has raised $40 million, its third funding round in recent years. The Series B round is led by consumer-focused VC Forerunner with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line. This round brings Agentio’s total funding to $56 million and values the company at $340 million.
The startup was founded in 2023 by CEO Arthur Leopold, a former president of celebrity talent marketplace Cameo, and chief technology officer Jonathan Myers, a former Spotify engineer who led the company’s automated content marketing team. Since its last funding round in November 2024, Agentio has grown 5x.
The company said brands are seeing impressive results in their campaigns with Agentio. For example, Bombas, a hosiery and apparel brand, said it saw a 5.3x higher return on ad spend with Agentio campaigns and a 90% net new customer rate compared to video ad spend on other platforms. Agentio also said that brands that typically take more than six months to spend their ad budgets on Meta and Google can now reap better returns in a matter of months through Agentio’s platform.
“Before Agentio, the historical challenge was for brands to partner with creators at scale. Our mantra since the company was founded was for brands to use AI to automate the ad buying process for the best results. As AI content begins to proliferate in people’s feeds, we’re seeing brands realize that this level of trust that creators have with their audiences is unbeatable,” Leopold told TechCrunch by phone.
The company did not provide exact numbers, but said it currently pays creators tens of millions of dollars. Over the past year, the company notes that creators who joined Agentio were able to more than double their brand partnership revenue within six months. Additionally, the time it takes creators to get their first bid has gone from 45-50 days last year to less than a day this year. This is also a side effect of the platform’s scaling, with enough supply and demand to facilitate faster matching and higher returns.
On the product side, Agentio has focused on integrating inference models and multimodal understanding. In the former, we built Campaign Manager to help marketers create campaigns using AI. This feature is now a key feature across all advertising platforms.
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Last year, Agentio launched an AI-powered feature that matches brands with creators who meet brand safety standards. Earlier this year, the company shipped an AI-powered content review feature that can check drafts submitted by creators to determine whether they are on point and safe to upload.
“Previously, brands had to assign someone to watch every creator’s video to make sure they followed the campaign outline,” Myers says. “Now, our agents check all these parameters, allowing brands to save time and quickly deploy and scale campaigns.”
He also said that with improvements in AI and profiling of both brands and creators, the company no longer needs to be limited to certain types of creators or companies. Through data matching, we matched brands with creators who may have been ignored in the past. For example, health supplement brands typically collaborate with fitness and wellness creators. However, Agentio may also suggest targeting creators who work outdoors. While most of Agentio’s brands are consumer-focused, the company says it is also starting to see demand from organizations in the B2B space.
The company is also beta testing its Meta platform, which primarily focuses on video formats such as Reels, after spending two years working primarily on YouTube’s services. The company plans to foster connections between creators and brands and promote their products and services using meta-partnership ads that won’t appear in the main feed.
The company says many of Agentio’s creators already have a presence on social networks like Instagram, making it easier to scale their campaigns. In 2026, we plan to support more platforms, including TikTok and Snap.
Forerunner Managing Partner Yuri Kim said the venture capital firm had been tracking Agentio for more than a year as a startup providing services to other companies in its portfolio.
“We have been following Agentio for over a year and built a relationship with Arthur and Jonathan by introducing them to some of our biggest brands. They quickly became customers and advocates on the platform. Unlocking multiple channels was a clear signal that Agentio can be the AI-powered media planning platform of the future, starting with the most valuable marketing asset of the future: the creator,” Kim told TechCrunch via email.
Agentio said the team has grown from 12 to 35 employees since last year and plans to grow to more than 100 employees next year.
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