Views on sponsored videos on YouTube have risen 28% year-on-year, and the number of sponsored videos has grown by 54% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, according to a report from Tubefilter. What’s more, ad spend through creator channels has been steadily rising and is even set to outperform traditional media in some cases.
Buoyed by these signals, Agentio, a startup that connects brands with YouTube creators for sponsored videos, has raised its third funding round of $40 million in as many 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 fundraising to $56 million, valuing the company at $340 million.
The startup was founded in 2023 by CEO Arthur Leopold, former president at celebrity talent marketplace Cameo, and CTO Jonathan Meyers, a former Spotify engineer who led the company’s automated content marketing team. Since its last funding round in November 2024, Agentio has grown fivefold.
The startup said that brands have seen impressive gains in their campaigns on Agentio. For example, the company said that Bombas, a socks and apparel brand, saw 5.3x better return on ad spend and a 90% net new customer rate from Agentio campaigns as compared to video ad spending on other platforms. Agentio also said that brands that typically take over six months to spend their ad budgets on Meta and Google could do it in a few months through Agentio’s platform with better returns.
“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. As AI content has started to proliferate in people’s feeds, we are seeing that brands realize that this level of trust that creators have with their audiences is unbeatable,” Leopold told TechCrunch over a call.
The company didn’t provide exact figures but said that it has now paid tens of millions of dollars to creators. It noted that over the course of last year, creators joining Agentio have been able to more than double their brand partnership earnings within six months. Plus, the time to the first bid creators get has gone from 45-50 days last year to less than a day this year. This is also a side effect of the platform scaling — having enough supply and demand to facilitate rapid matching and higher earnings.
On the product side, Agentio has concentrated on integrating reasoning models and multimodal understanding. With the former, it has built a campaign manager that helps marketers craft campaigns using AI, a feature that is now table stakes across all ad platforms.
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Last year, Agentio shipped an AI-powered feature to match brands with creators that could 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 a person to watch every single creator video to make sure they were following the campaign brief,” Meyers said. “Now, our agent checks all these parameters that save time for brands and allows them to roll out and scale campaigns rapidly.”
He also mentioned that because of AI and better profiling of both brands and creators, the company hasn’t had to constrain itself to a particular type of creator or company. Through their data matching, it has matched brands with creators who might have been traditionally ignored. For instance, a health supplement brand would typically work with fitness and wellness creators. However, Agentio could suggest they also target creators who work outdoors. While most of the brands Agentio serves are consumer-centric, the startup said that it has also started seeing demand from organizations in the B2B space.
After spending two years largely serving YouTube, the company is also beta testing Meta platforms, largely focusing on video formats like Reels. The company will facilitate a connection between creators and brands and use Meta partnership ads that don’t show up on the main feed to promote a product or a service.
The company said that since a lot of creators on Agentio already have a presence on social networks like Instagram, it has been able to scale campaigns more easily. In 2026, it plans to support more platforms like TikTok and Snap.
Eurie Kim, managing partner at Forerunner, said that the VC firm had been tracking Agentio for over a year as the startup served other companies in its portfolio.
“We’d been tracking Agentio for over a year, building a relationship with Arthur and Jonathan by introducing them to some of our biggest brands, who immediately became customers and champions of the platform. Unlocking multiple channels was a clear signal for us that Agentio could be the AI-powered media planning platform of the future, starting with the most valuable marketing asset of the future: creators,” Kim told TechCrunch over email.
Agentio said that since last year, it has scaled its team from 12 employees to 35 employees, and it plans to increase its headcount to beyond 100 in the next year.
