- Tano, a London-based startup, has raised a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures.
- Tano says its AI agents are having around 400,000 conversations with creators each month.
- With this round, Tano’s total funding is now $5M. CEO Will Caplan says Cherry Ventures moved very quickly to lead the round.
Will Caplan worked at Encord, a London-based AI data company, during the day and, in the evenings, was a creator with around 15,000 followers, doing brand deals. He’d be negotiating rates and availability via email.
“I had this absolutely bizarre duality in my life where during the day I was building some of the most cutting-edge technology in the world, and in the evenings I was doing all these manual brand deals. I just couldn’t believe those two things could exist side by side,” Caplan told Tech Funding News.
That bottleneck became Taro, which Caplan co-founded in 2025 with Sagar Shah.
The company just closed a $4 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, taking its total funding to $5 million. Seedcamp led the earlier round in late 2025, with The Players Fund and Operators & Friends, which was approximately $800,000.
Caplan says there are around 20 people in the London office, and the new funding will go to computing, engineering, and hiring creator strategists.
Two creators with one complaint about agencies
Caplan and Shah founded Tano in February 2025. Caplan’s background, as per our conversation, is growth at Encord and sales at Onfido. Shah was a founding engineer at Holly and also worked at Let’s Do This. In 2025, Net Influencer reported that Caplan helped his sister grow her Instagram to hundreds of thousands of followers and managed her business.
Both founders missed out on opportunities and were treated very poorly when working with brands and agencies as creators. Tano’s view is that agencies find it too costly to run many small partnerships, so smaller creators who are genuinely interested in the product are effectively overlooked.
“Our vision is to build the world’s largest advertising channel for commerce, driven by people. We want to tap into the millions of creative minds out there without diluting the individuality of their content. That’s the Creator Advertising Platform we’re building,” said Caplan.
What the agents do, and what Tano says they deliver
Caplan says the software does it all: “It finds the influencer, it emails them, it sends the product to their house autonomously, it talks to them, it pays them. Everything is autonomous.”
The platform works across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, which Tano says accounts for over 95% of creator spend. The tracking links, discount codes, and shop integrations link the post to the sale, and top-performing posts can be turned into paid ads if the creator is happy to do so.
One of the big risks is, of course, matching the wrong creators with the products. “That’s kind of the secret sauce, actually. It is a very difficult engineering problem. Tano has guardrails and confidence rankings on its agents, and humans come in when the system isn’t confident. The announcement also mentions human creator strategists working with the agents,” explains Caplan.
According to the company, it works with tens of thousands of creators and has around 400,000 one-to-ones a month, supporting a wide range of advertisers. The agents are multilingual, so Tano can operate in Germany, the US, and the UK and support any language.
In one instance, Tano says its agents found and vetted 2,358 creators in just two hours of a brand expert’s time. The company estimated that would take 754 hours to do by hand.
The customers named are Unilever, HelloFresh, Bloom & Wild and Skin+Me. Tano says Q3 was its best yet, with creator posts up 139% and creator-driven sales up 113% on the quarter, and their average customer acquisition cost down 12%. Over 65% of the creators who posted for Tano brands in 2026 posted again, with the average repeat poster putting out 5.3 posts for the same brand.
The announcement positions Tano alongside Mailchimp, Klaviyo, The Trade Desk and AppLovin, all of which have software margins. Tano still has its agents working in conjunction with human strategists, and Caplan says the new funds will go primarily to computing and creative strategists. As the number of computers and strategists increases, both of those will impact software margins.
Fluencify, a Stockholm-based startup that raised a $4.3M pre-seed round led by byFounders and hit $2M in annual recurring revenue in just six months of operation, is another company that operates in a similar way. Elsewhere, CreatorIQ, which works with the big brands, raised $40 million in 2021.
The $44B channel behind the round
Goldman Sachs forecasts the broader creator economy, including platform payouts and brand spend, at $480 billion by 2027. A lot of capital is being deployed in the space: TFN reported Whop’s $205 million Series D in October, and Fanvue doubled its annual revenue run rate to $200 million in July.
Dinika Mahtani, partner at Cherry, added, “Creator marketing has been capped by how many relationships an agency team can manage, rather than how many people have something worth saying. Will and Sagar were creators before they were founders, so they know exactly where that model breaks. Tano is building the platform where the next wave of ad spend will go, and we think it will become one of the biggest in commerce.”
Caplan sees the next step as particularly interesting. Tano has started to facilitate agent-to-agent negotiations, with the brand agent and the creator agent now negotiating directly with each other.
The company will have to show that creators will keep producing content as incentives decline and that margins improve as the business scales, rather than relying only on strategists.
