Tano raises $4m seed to let AI agents sign and pay creators

UK start-up Tano has raised a $4m seed round led by Cherry Ventures to let AI agents find, sign and pay creators on behalf of brands — and its pricing, not the round, is the number that matters to affiliate operators.

Brands on Tano generally pay either per creator post that goes live or a share of affiliate revenue, with some larger clients on a flat fee. That structure ties Tano's income to sales as well as content, and it places the company in direct competition with affiliate networks — not only with influencer software such as CreatorIQ and Aspire, or with agencies.

Business Insider first reported the round.

Who is behind Tano and who pays it?

Founded in 2025 by Will Caplan and Sagar Shah, both described as part-time creators — Caplan runs a tech and science TikTok account — Tano has now raised $5m in total, with earlier backing from Seedcamp and The Players Fund. Its client list includes Unilever, HelloFresh, Lovable, Skin+Me and Bloom & Wild.

The agents scan a database of more than 280 million creator profiles, listen to audio and read comment-section sentiment to vet creators, then run the conversation from first contact through contract to payment. Once a post goes live, Tano tracks whether it drives clicks or sales and recommends which posts to boost with paid spend, feeding results back into its recommendations.

"A brand should be able to come to a creator advertising platform and allocate their budget and the intent," Caplan said.

What do the performance claims actually rest on?

Tano says its agents talk to more than 5,000 creators a month and that one consumer goods client's programme took 25 times fewer hours than running it manually. Both are company figures, not audited results, and the sample behind the 25x claim is a single client.

The model shifts more risk onto creators. Where a brand pays a share of affiliate revenue, the creator's fee is likely to depend on sales tracked through a link or code rather than an agreed rate for the post — effectively moving creator deals from flat-fee sponsorship toward rev-share terms set by the platform. Tano has not disclosed how it splits that revenue with creators, what percentage it takes, or how it handles attribution when a post is boosted with paid media.

That gap matters for affiliates used to interrogating cookie windows and attribution rules. The trade-off also sits against what creators and agencies have long argued makes the channel work. "Audiences are always drawn to effort, to honesty, to storytelling," Becky Owen, then global chief marketing officer at Billion Dollar Boy, told Hello Partner in November 2025.

How big is the market it is entering?

IAB UK has said UK creator ad spend will pass £1bn this year. Tano joins other attempts to automate the deal itself, from No Logo's AI talent manager Lola to Ogilvy's Echo, the AI platform that raised questions over talent fees by generating 50 ads from one shoot.

Tano says the new money will go on compute and on growing its engineering and creator strategist teams.

For UK creators, the first approach for a brand deal may increasingly come from software, and the fee may rest on sales they did not set the terms for. For brands, the question to ask any platform like this is who it works for when its pay depends on the same sales as the creator's.