Agentio
Buying the creator economy, by machine.

Advertising has always chased attention, and for the better part of a decade that attention has drained out of television and traditional media into the feeds and channels of individual creators. The money, though, has been slow to follow - not for lack of interest, but for lack of infrastructure. Booking a creator campaign has meant weeks of emails, spreadsheets, contracts, and guesswork. Agentio, a New York company founded in 2023, is trying to remove that friction.

The platform is AI-native and built for one job: let a brand buy creator advertising the way it already buys ads on Meta or Google. It predicts which creators will perform, connects the brand to verified and authenticated creators, automates the booking and payment machinery, and measures the result. The company's own framing is blunt - "Creator media is the most trusted channel. Agentio is how you buy it."

Founder and chief executive Arthur Leopold arrived at the problem from the inside. As the first employee and later president of the celebrity-video marketplace Cameo, he helped scale that business to roughly $500 million in sales. His co-founder, chief technology officer Jonathan Meyers, is a former Spotify engineer who led automated content marketing there. The pairing - marketplace operator plus automation engineer - reads directly onto the product.

Their comparison of choice is DoubleClick, the ad-tech engine that made display advertising programmatic and, in doing so, unlocked a market worth hundreds of billions. Agentio's wager is that sponsored creator content is ready for the same treatment: standardized, measured, and bought at scale rather than negotiated one deal at a time.

Agentio sits in the gap between two large, fast-moving worlds: the creator economy, where attention has concentrated, and performance advertising, where dollars demand measurement. Its competitors range from influencer-marketing software such as CreatorIQ, Grin and Captiv8 to the agencies and in-house teams still running creator deals on spreadsheets. In a broader sense, it competes for the same budgets brands would otherwise pour into Meta and Google.

The founders' expertise maps to that seam. Leopold spent five years building marketplace supply and revenue at Cameo; Meyers spent his career automating marketing systems at scale. The company keeps its team deliberately lean - Leopold has spoken about a hiring philosophy where constraint drives invention, summarized in his own phrase: if you starve the team, they build a farm.

The near-term plan, funded by the Series B, is to push beyond YouTube - the only platform Agentio bought against at the time of the raise - into Meta Partnership Ads and additional surfaces, and to grow the team past 100 people. Strategic advisors include Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, the creators behind "Good Mythical Morning," a signal of how closely the company wants to stay tied to the creator community it sells.

Whether creator advertising becomes as programmatic as display remains an open question. But the direction of travel - attention leaving the feed, budgets chasing it, and buyers demanding the same rigor they get everywhere else - is the current Agentio is riding.