A feed goes in. Two thousand ads come out.
In the arithmetic of modern advertising, the bottleneck is rarely the media budget. It is the creative - the endless resizing, relocalizing, and reformatting of the same product, over and over, across platforms that each demand something slightly different. Hunch, a company founded in Belgrade in 2018, built its business on a single, stubborn observation: that work should not be done by hand.
Hunch calls itself a creative performance platform. In plain terms, it takes a brand's product catalog - the raw feed of images, prices, and descriptions that powers an online store - and turns it into finished advertising at scale. Dynamic product ads. Catalog product video. Hyper-local campaigns that swap in the right store, the right language, and the right offer for each audience. According to the company, it can produce more than 2,000 localized ads in roughly 30 minutes, a task that would otherwise occupy a creative team for days.
"Build, launch, learn. 10x faster."
That tagline is also a thesis. Most advertising tools split the job into silos: one team makes the creative, another buys the media, a third reads the reports weeks later. Hunch's argument is that those three functions should live in a single loop, where the results of one campaign automatically shape the next. The company describes this as the "second act of advertising" - a closed system where performance data does not just get reported, it gets acted on.
The problems it sets out to solve
The pain Hunch addresses is familiar to anyone who has run paid social at scale. Creative demand outstrips what a team can produce. Localization multiplies the workload by every market a brand enters. And the feedback loop between "what we launched" and "what worked" is slow enough that lessons arrive too late to matter. Hunch compresses all three: automating production, generating localized variants in bulk, and unifying insights across Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok in one dashboard.
The results its customers report are specific. Academy Sports & Outdoors, the US retailer, is cited with a 2.3x incremental return on ad spend. The car marketplace Carwow reports a 242% lift in ROI. Kiwi.com, the travel-booking site, points to a 77% drop in cost per acquisition. And a catalog video campaign for the grocer SPAR saw video completion rates climb 612%. Metrics from vendor case studies always deserve a raised eyebrow - but the throughline is consistent: automation applied to creative, measured against revenue.
How it differs from the giants
Hunch operates in a crowded field. The dominant name is Smartly, the enterprise leader that manages close to $5 billion in ad spend for brands like Walmart and Disney. Other rivals - Celtra, AdCreative.ai, Confect, Marpipe, ROI Hunter - each stake out a slice of the dynamic-creative-optimization market.
Rather than match Smartly feature-for-feature, Hunch out-focused it. Where Smartly is built for the largest advertisers with dedicated operations teams, Hunch targets the mid-market: growth-stage brands spending roughly €80,000 to €500,000 a month on paid social. It offers more than catalog ads - campaign automation and media buying too - but sized and priced for teams the incumbents find too small to court. It is a familiar strategy for a challenger: be unmissable to the customers a giant cannot be bothered to serve.
"The future is not just automated. It's self-preserving."
The people behind it
Hunch was founded by Sinisa "Siggi" Rakovic, who serves as CEO, alongside co-founder and CTO Igor Simovic and co-founder Nikola Milenkovic. Rakovic's own story is part of the company's identity: he returned to Belgrade from California with the explicit aim of bridging Western brands with Eastern European engineering talent. Hunch is, by his account, his third startup - and the clearest expression of that bet.
That origin shapes the culture. The company is founder-led and results-oriented, built on the premise that world-class adtech does not have to be built on a coast in the United States. In 2022, that thesis attracted a €4 million round led by Catalyst Romania Fund II, with participation from investors including South Central Ventures and 3TS Capital Partners - capital raised specifically to scale across Europe.
Where it fits in the market
Zoom out and Hunch occupies a specific coordinate: the intersection of creative automation, dynamic product ads, and cross-channel media buying, aimed at the mid-market. It is not the cheapest catalog-ad tool, nor the enterprise heavyweight. It is the platform for the brand that has outgrown manual production but has not signed up for eight-figure ad budgets - the fashion retailer, the travel site, the grocer, the automotive marketplace. Recognition has followed: in 2025, G2 named Hunch a Regional Leader in EMEA, a High Performer, and a Momentum Leader. Quiet validation for a company still building from Serbia.