Tano, a London startup that uses AI agents to run influencer campaigns for consumer brands, has raised a $4M seed round led by Cherry Ventures.
The round, announced on 11 November, takes Tano's total funding to $5M. Seedcamp backed the company from day one and led an earlier round in late 2025 with The Players Fund and Operators & Friends.
Tano calls itself a creator advertising platform. Its pitch is simple: brands should be able to buy creator content the way they buy Meta or Google ads.
Who founded Tano?
Will Caplan, chief executive, and Sagar Shah founded Tano in February 2025. Both worked as creators before starting the company.
Caplan previously led growth at Encord and worked in sales at Onfido. Shah was a founding engineer at Holly and earlier worked at Let's Do This.
The company has around 20 people in its London office.
What do Tano's AI agents do?
The agents handle the slow parts of influencer marketing. They find suitable creators, make contact, ship products, manage the conversation and pay creators once posts go live.
Tano covers Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, which it says account for more than 95% of creator spend. Tracking links, discount codes and shop integrations tie each post to sales.
When the system is unsure, guardrails and confidence scores pass the task to a human creator strategist. The agents work in several languages and run campaigns in the UK, Germany and the US.
Tano has also started agent-to-agent negotiation, where a brand's agent and a creator's agent agree terms directly.
How much traction does Tano have?
Clients include Unilever, HelloFresh, Bloom & Wild and Skin+Me. Tano says its agents hold around 400,000 conversations with creators each month.
In the third quarter, creator posts rose 139% and creator-driven sales rose 113% on the previous quarter, while customer acquisition cost fell 12%. More than 65% of creators who posted for a Tano brand in 2026 came back to post again.
In one campaign, the agents vetted 2,358 creators using two hours of a brand expert's time. Tano estimates that would take 754 hours by hand.
What will the $4M pay for?
The money goes on compute, engineering hires and more creator strategists.
Dinika Mahtani, partner at Cherry Ventures, said creator marketing has been limited by how many relationships an agency team can manage, rather than by how many people have something worth saying.
What this means for UK founders
Tano is part of a wider wave of UK startups building AI agents that take over a whole service workflow, not just a single task. The model replaces agency hours with software plus a small expert team.
For consumer brands, the appeal is predictable spend. For founders, the lesson is that service-heavy markets such as influencer marketing are now fair game for agent-first startups. Bizztor's guide to AI tools for small teams and solo founders covers the same shift from the buyer's side.
Tano also adds to the money flowing into UK marketing technology startups. Its next test is whether agent-negotiated deals hold up at scale without creators feeling they are talking to a machine.