creative-automation
(14)
Hunch
Hunch is a creative performance platform that unifies creative, media, and insights so paid-social teams can build, launch, and learn faster across Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok. Founded in Belgrade in 2018, it automates dynamic product ads, catalog product video, and hyper-local campaigns at scale, using AI to turn performance data into better creative. Its customers are mid-market and growth-stage e-commerce, retail, travel, and betting brands that want the automation power of enterprise tools like Smartly without the enterprise overhead.
The Brandtech Group
The Brandtech Group is a marketing technology holding company built to help the world's largest brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology - and, increasingly, generative AI. Founded by former Havas CEO David Jones in 2015 as 'You & Mr Jones,' it has grown through a string of acquisitions into a digital-only group of roughly 7,000 people across 40+ countries, spanning in-housing agency Oliver, performance-media group Jellyfish, and its flagship generative-AI ad platform Pencil Pro. Clients include eight of the world's ten largest advertisers, and after a $115M Series C in 2024 the group was valued at about $4 billion.
The Brief
The Brief is an AI marketing platform that runs the full advertising campaign lifecycle - discovering competitor and market signals, creating ads at scale, launching them across channels, and optimizing performance - through a system of four AI agents. Formerly the ad-design tool Creatopy, the company rebranded to The Brief in October 2025 to position itself as an 'AI agency' for in-house marketing teams and agencies, and reports nearly 10,000 brands using the platform.
Pixis
Pixis is a codeless AI infrastructure company for marketing, giving advertising teams a suite of plug-and-play AI models that plan, target, optimize, and create ad campaigns without writing code. Founded in 2018 by three BITS Pilani classmates and headquartered in Burlingame, California, the company has built 200+ proprietary AI models and serves more than 1,000 customers, including 18 Fortune 2000 brands. It raised $209M across Series A through C1, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, General Atlantic, Touring Capital, and others.
Sinisa Rakovich
Sinisa (Siggi) Rakovich is the founder and CEO of Hunch, a creative performance platform used by paid social teams at global brands and agencies to automate ad creative, media buying, and cross-channel insights across Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. Split between New York and Belgrade, Hunch was co-founded in 2018 by Rakovich with Igor Simovic and Nikola Milenkovic, a team that had worked together for more than 15 years. Before Hunch, Rakovich founded Building Explorer, a real-estate platform acquired by PBF in 2010. Hunch raised a €4M round led by Catalyst Romania in 2022 and works with more than 100 global brands.
Genus AI
Genus AI is a generative-AI marketing platform for direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands. It turns a product catalog into thousands of on-brand ad creatives, videos, seed audiences and copy, then distributes and optimizes them across Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest and other channels. Founded in 2017 by brothers Tadas and Viktoras Jucikas, the company pairs a Nashville headquarters with a machine-learning hub in Vilnius, Lithuania, and generates tens of millions of catalog images and videos each month.
Icon
Icon is a New York startup that launched in 2024 as 'the world's first AI Admaker' - software pitched as ChatGPT plus CapCut for churning out short-form video ads in minutes. Founded by serial entrepreneur Kennan Davison (aka Kennan Frost) and backed by a $9.2M seed round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Icon paid a reported $12M for the icon.com domain and drew backing from OpenAI, Cognition and Pika executives plus celebrity angels. After users complained the fully-automated product fell short, the company pivoted toward human-filmed UGC ads (six ads for $999) branded 'The Human Admaker,' before reports in early 2026 said it had gone quiet.
It'sRapid
It'sRapid is a Palo Alto-based AI creative automation platform that turns product data and existing assets into retailer-compliant commerce content - images, videos, display ads, sell sheets and product copy - at scale. Its Optix engine scores and audits creative before and after it goes live, and the platform has helped brands like PepsiCo cut per-asset production from hours to minutes and retail media networks shrink campaign go-live from ten weeks to under two.
Layer
Layer is a San Francisco-based AI content creation platform built for game studios and entertainment brands. It plugs generative AI directly into existing production pipelines so artists can generate and refine style-consistent 2D, 3D, video and audio assets at scale while keeping creative control. Model-agnostic and artist-first, Layer lets teams train custom models on their own art and export into engines like Unity, Unreal and Godot. It is used by 300+ studios and 10,000+ artists, producers and growth teams, including Zynga, SciPlay, Tripledot and Huuuge Games.
Omneky
Omneky is a San Francisco generative-AI platform that automatically produces, tests, and optimizes advertising creative - image, video, and UGC-style spokesperson ads - and launches campaigns across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Founded in 2018 by Hikari Senju, it was one of the earliest movers in applying generative AI to advertising, using computer vision and multimodal analysis to predict which creatives will perform and to close the loop between making ads and measuring them. The company has since pivoted toward 'agentic' AI advertising agents that set campaign goals, execute subtasks, and reallocate budget across channels.
Upscale AI
Upscale AI is an AI-native advertising platform that lets performance-driven and e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize TV-quality video ads on streaming and connected TV channels. Its flagship product, Upscale Studio, turns a brand's existing website and social assets into streaming-ready creative, buys media programmatically in real time, and optimizes campaigns for measurable outcomes - bringing the performance-marketing playbook to the living-room screen. Founded by ad-tech veterans from Google, Twitter, Salesforce, Moloco, and MNTN, the company launched out of stealth in May 2025 with $5.5M in funding.
David Feinleib
David Feinleib is a serial entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, and author who is now Founder and CEO of It'sRapid.ai, a Palo Alto AI platform that turns product data and existing assets into finished commerce content for major brands. He has founded multiple companies acquired by EMC, HP, and Keynote Systems, sold Content Analytics to Syndigo in 2019, invested as a General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and written four books including 'Why Startups Fail' and 'Big Data Bootcamp.'
Hikari Senju
Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco generative AI platform that creates, analyzes, and optimizes personalized ad creative at scale. A Harvard computer scientist and son of celebrated Nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju, he began building in generative AI in 2018, five years before ChatGPT made the field mainstream. His mission is to lower the cost of effective advertising so that any founder with a compelling idea can reach customers without a million-dollar budget. Omneky has raised over $13 million from investors including SoftBank and AIX Ventures, and in 2024-2025 Senju pivoted the company toward agentic AI that autonomously plans and runs campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
Volkan Gurel
Volkan Gurel is the co-founder and CEO of Layer, an AI operating system for creative teams in gaming and entertainment. An MIT-trained engineer who has built distributed systems and machine learning pipelines at Hunch, eBay, Airware, and Coinbase, he holds four UAV patents from his drone-engineering years. In 2023 he co-founded Layer with Burcu Hakguder to let game studios generate performance-ready images, video, 3D, and audio without scaling headcount or outsourcing. The company is backed by a board of gaming heavyweights including King co-founder Riccardo Zacconi, and serves studios like Zynga, King, and Peak Games.