creator-marketing
(7)
Duel Tech
Duel is a London-founded B2B SaaS company that runs a Brand Advocacy Platform, helping consumer retail brands recruit, activate and scale tens of thousands of customers, creators, fans, employees and ambassadors into a measurable word-of-mouth growth channel. Founded in 2017 by adventurer-turned-entrepreneur Paul Archer and games developer Naio Tsarouchis, and certified as a B Corp, Duel powers advocacy programs for brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and Pandora, and raised a $16M Series A in September 2025.
Upfluence
Upfluence is an all-in-one influencer and creator marketing platform that helps ecommerce and D2C brands find, contact, manage, and pay content creators while tying campaigns directly to sales. Built around a searchable database of millions of creator profiles across seven social networks and deep integrations with platforms like Shopify, Upfluence positions influencer marketing as a measurable revenue channel rather than a branding expense. Its distinctive Live Capture technology surfaces influential creators from a brand's own customer base, and its Jaice AI co-pilot automates campaign briefs, creator matching, and outreach.
Statusphere
Statusphere is an AI-powered influencer marketing platform that helps enterprise retailers and consumer brands turn micro-influencers into a scalable, measurable growth channel. It automates the messy parts of creator programs - matching, product fulfillment, compliance, content rights and reporting - so brands can generate authentic user-generated content at scale and improve product discovery across social and AI-powered search. Founded by Kristen Wiley in 2016, the company has powered tens of thousands of creator collaborations for brands including Fenty Beauty, Express and Kendo Brands.
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.
Jason Kowalski
Jason Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of ProductWind, an influencer technology platform built for brands that sell on online retailers like Amazon and Walmart. A former Amazon product lead who built the retailer's self-service marketing platform, Kowalski started ProductWind in 2020 on a contrarian idea: brands should market to retail algorithms, not just shoppers. The company coordinates thousands of micro-influencers to move e-commerce metrics that matter to those algorithms - sales velocity, reviews, organic placement, and Best Seller Rank - rather than chasing likes and reach. Bootstrapped and profitable from day one, ProductWind grew revenue tenfold before raising a total of roughly $5.17M in seed funding.
Reacher
Reacher is an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing for TikTok Shop, Instagram, and YouTube - turning the chaos of influencer outreach, sample logistics, and affiliate tracking into a single workflow. Founded in 2024 by Jerry Qian and Bora Mutluoglu, the YC S25 startup serves brands like Under Armour, Hanes, and Logitech, claiming 1,000+ brands and 3.4M+ indexed creators.
Paul Benigeri
Paul Benigeri is the co-founder and CEO of Archive, an AI-powered influencer and user-generated-content marketing platform he launched with Geoffrey Woo in 2021. A Stanford computer-science graduate raised in Paris, he spent his early career writing code at First Round Capital and RockMelt before scaling growth and engineering at the nutrition company HVMN. Archive grew from a Shopify app that auto-captured Instagram Stories into a platform used by brands like Quest, Allbirds and Hexclad, raising roughly $12M-plus and reaching a reported $100M valuation in about 18 months while staying lean and remote-first.