The AI platform automating creator marketing for the world's largest TikTok Shop brands - and quietly turning influencer outreach into an API call.
Photographed in the wild: a 23-person startup eating the manual middle of e-commerce.
Somewhere in San Francisco, a marketing manager at Under Armour opens a dashboard, types six words into a search bar - "fitness creators, age 22-35, US, performance apparel" - and walks away to get coffee. By the time she returns, 1,200 TikTok creators have been ranked by predicted GMV, the top 300 have received personalized outreach, and 47 have already replied. She did not write a single message. She did not open TikTok. The platform behind the curtain is Reacher.
This is the part of e-commerce nobody writes essays about: the messy, repetitive, faintly humiliating work of asking strangers on the internet to please, please film themselves wearing your hoodie. Brands have been doing it by hand for a decade. Agencies have charged a fortune for it. Spreadsheets have died for it. And then, last August, a 23-person startup quietly closed a seed round, walked into the Y Combinator Summer 2025 batch, and decided that the entire workflow - from "who do we even DM" through "did the sample ship" through "how much revenue did that creator drive" - should fit inside one login.
Reacher was founded in 2024 by Jerry Qian and Bora Mutluoglu. Qian, the CEO, previously worked at Meta, studied at Berkeley, and - charmingly - did time at NASA. Mutluoglu came from Palo Alto Networks. The two of them looked at the creator economy and noticed something almost everyone else had been too polite to mention: it runs on copy-paste. The world's largest brands were paying smart humans to manually paste names into DMs.
So they built the thing that would obviously replace that. They called it Reacher. The name is a verb in disguise.
The product, as it exists today, is less a tool than a switchboard. AI Creator Discovery scans 3.4 million indexed creators and matches them to a brief written in plain English. Automated Outreach sends bulk DMs, collaboration invites, sample requests, and email sequences without anyone touching a keyboard. A Creator CRM tracks every conversation, every shipment, every dollar of attributable GMV. Sample Management - the unglamorous logistics problem nobody tweets about - has its own queue. Campaigns handle retainers and contests. And the most recent addition, a full API with MCP support, lets brands run TikTok Shop programmatically. Anything you can do in the portal, you can do in code.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. Reacher's own marketing claims its customers save more than 150 hours a week. That is roughly four full-time jobs, evaporated, per account. The company says it works with more than 1,000 brands. The brands it names out loud include Under Armour, Hanes, and Logitech - the kind of logos that turn skeptical investors into nodding investors.
"We automate creator marketing for the world's largest brands."
- Reacher, on the recordReacher is built like a CRM that wandered into an ad platform that wandered into a logistics console. Each panel is small. Together they are the entire job.
Describe an ideal creator in plain English. The AI matches by content, demographics, and predicted performance.
Bulk DMs, collab invites, email sequences, and sample requests sent at scale - personalized, queued, tracked.
Real-time tracking of the top-performing brands and creators across TikTok Shop, surfaced to brief writers.
One pane of glass for status, messages, samples, and attributable GMV per creator.
Retainers, challenges, and contests with reward structures. The clipboard work, automated.
A unified queue for approvals and shipping. Possibly the least glamorous, most useful feature.
Run TikTok Shop end-to-end programmatically. Anything in the portal, in code.
Affiliate metrics, profitability, and a view of which creators actually moved product.
An approximate breakdown of what brands say Reacher automates away each week. Numbers are illustrative of where time tends to disappear in TikTok Shop programs.
Co-Founder & CEO
Berkeley, NASA, Meta - then DMing TikTok creators for a living. The pivot is not as strange as it sounds: orbital mechanics and influencer attribution are both, at heart, optimization problems.
Co-Founder
Came from Palo Alto Networks. Now applies the same discipline he once spent on packet inspection to the deeply different but equally adversarial world of brand-creator inboxes.
Founded. Jerry Qian and Bora Mutluoglu start Reacher in San Francisco.
Reacher hits 1,000+ brand customers and crosses 7-figure ARR.
Joins Y Combinator's S25 batch.
Reports a seed round alongside YC participation.
Earns Gold on the TikTok Shop App Store - one of only two apps to do so out of 50+.
Launches API + MCP that runs TikTok Shop programmatically end-to-end.
Plenty of platforms claim to do creator marketing. Most are creator databases pretending to be CRMs, or CRMs pretending to be ad platforms. Reacher is built on a simpler, less glamorous insight: the work that actually consumes a brand's time is not strategy. It is the 30-second tasks repeated 400 times.
So Reacher swallows the 30-second tasks. The DM. The follow-up. The sample request. The shipping confirmation. The GMV reconciliation. Each one looks trivial. Each one, multiplied by a creator roster, is a full-time job. Reacher's gold-rank position on the TikTok Shop App Store - one of two, out of 50+ - is essentially a referee's award for handling the messy parts properly.
The other unusual choice: building the API and MCP layer this early. Most creator-marketing tools live inside a browser tab. Reacher's bet is that brands large enough to matter want to script the platform, not click through it. That bet, quietly placed, makes Reacher one of the first influencer platforms designed to be operated by other software.
And yet none of this is marketed loudly. Reacher's homepage uses the words "autopilot" and "growth" and lists the right logos. The actual product is, mercifully, less excitable than the category usually allows.
Describe the ideal creator in a sentence. Reacher returns a ranked list pulled from 3.4M indexed profiles.
Outreach goes out in bulk. Replies route back into the CRM with status, owner, and history attached.
The sample queue holds approvals, addresses, and follow-up logic in one place.
The dashboard ties revenue back to the person who drove it - not the campaign, the person.
Brands plug Reacher into existing systems and run TikTok Shop programs in code.
Campaign tooling for retainers, reward structures, and recurring creator programs.
The CEO's CV reads Meta, Berkeley, NASA - and now: bulk DMs.
Reacher claims to save customers 150+ hours a week. That is four full-time roles, vaporized.
Two of fifty TikTok Shop apps have ever earned Gold. Reacher is one of them.
Back in San Francisco, the marketing manager at Under Armour finishes her coffee. Forty-seven creator replies are waiting. Three of them will become long-term partners. One of them will move a meaningful amount of inventory by Friday. She did not draft a brief. She did not chase a sample. She did not refresh a spreadsheet. The work is happening - it is just happening somewhere she does not have to watch it.
The opening scene started with 14,000 DMs about to send themselves. The closing scene is the same scene, only quieter. That is the shift Reacher is selling: not more output, but less attention required to produce it. A category that used to be defined by hustle - by who could DM the fastest, manage the most spreadsheets, ship the most samples - is being repositioned, one customer at a time, as software. Reacher is not the only company trying. But it is the one that earned Gold, hit seven figures before seed, and shipped the API while the rest of the category was still arguing about Instagram.
If creator marketing in 2026 still feels like a manual job, the people quietly using Reacher would like to gently disagree.
The official surface area, plus where the conversation happens.