Agentio secures $40M from Forerunner as it expands its creator marketplace beyond YouTube

Views of sponsored videos on YouTube rose 28% year over year, and the number of sponsored videos increased 54% year over year in the first half of 2025, according to Report from Tubefilter. What’s more, so was ad spending across creator channels Rising steadily and It is even set to outperform traditional media In some cases.

Influenced by these signals, an agencya startup that connects brands with sponsored video creators on YouTube, has raised its third $40 million funding round in as many years. The Series B round is led by consumer-focused VC firm Forerunner with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler and Starting Line. This round brings Agentio’s total fundraising to $56 million, valuing the company at $340 million.

The startup was founded in 2023 by CEO Arthur Leopold, the former head of celebrity talent marketplace Cameo, and CTO Jonathan Myers, a former Spotify engineer who led the company’s programmatic content marketing team. Since its last funding round in November 2024, Agentio has grown five-fold.

The startup said brands have seen impressive gains in their campaigns on Agentio. For example, Bombas, a sock and apparel brand, saw a 5.3x better return on ad spend and a 90% net new customer rate from Agentio campaigns compared to video ad spend on other platforms, the company said. Agentio also said that brands that typically take more than six months to spend their advertising budgets on Meta and Google can do so within a few months through Agentio’s platform with better returns.

“The historical challenge before Agentio was for brands to collaborate with creators at scale. Our belief since the company’s founding has been to use AI to automate the ad buying process for brands to get the best results. As AI content starts to spread across people’s feeds, we’re seeing brands realize that this level of trust that creators have with their audiences is unbeatable,” Leopold told TechCrunch over a phone call.

The company did not provide exact numbers but said it has now paid out tens of millions of dollars to creators. She noted that over the past year, creators who joined Agentio were able to double their brand partnership profits within six months. Additionally, the time needed to make a first offer for creators has dropped from 45 to 50 days last year to less than a day this year. This is also a side effect of scaling the platform – having enough supply and demand to facilitate quick matching and increased profits.

On the product side, Agentio has focused on integrating multimodal inference and understanding models. With the first, it built a campaign manager that helps marketers craft campaigns using artificial intelligence, a feature that’s now at stake Defeat everyone advertisement Platforms.

Last year, Agentio shipped an AI-powered feature that matches brands with creators who can match their brand safety standards. This year, the company shipped an AI-powered content review feature that can check a draft submitted by creators and determine if it hits the brief and is safe to upload.

“Previously, brands had to assign someone to watch each creator’s video to make sure they were following the campaign brief,” Myers said. “Now, our agent checks all these parameters which saves time for brands and allows them to roll out and scale campaigns quickly.”

He also stated that due to AI and better profiling of both brands and creators, the company did not have to limit itself to a specific type of creator or company. By matching its data, it matches brands with creators who may have traditionally been overlooked. For example, a health supplement brand usually works with fitness and wellness creators. However, Agentio can suggest that they are also targeting content creators who work outdoors. While most of the brands Agentio serves are consumer-centric, the startup said it is also starting to see demand from enterprises in the B2B space.

After spending two years largely serving YouTube, the company is also beta testing for Meta platforms, with a large focus on video formats like Reels. The company will facilitate communication between creators, brands and users Meta Partnership Announcements Which does not appear in the main feed to promote a product or service.

The company said that because many of Agentio’s creators already had a presence on social networks like Instagram, it was able to scale campaigns more easily. In 2026, it plans to support more platforms such as TikTok and Snap.

Yuri Kim, managing partner at Forerunner, said the venture capital firm had been tracking Agentio for more than a year as the startup served other companies in its portfolio.

“We’ve been tracking Agentio for over a year, and built a relationship with Arthur and Jonathan by introducing them to some of our biggest brands, who immediately became customers and champions of the platform. Opening multiple channels was a clear signal to us that Agentio could be the AI-powered media planning platform of the future, starting with the most valuable marketing assets of the future: creatives,” Kim told TechCrunch via email.

Since last year, Agentio said she has expanded her team from 12 employees to 35, and plans to increase her headcount to more than 100 next year.