Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they can engage at any one time.
Put simply, the creator marketing ecosystem is being held back in many ways by the old-world ad/marketing agency model. Wouldn’t it be easier if an AI chatbot could do all the heavy lifting, interacting naturally with an influencer via a platform that’s able to scale across hundreds of ad campaigns?
That’s the idea behind the company Agentic Marketing Technologies (AMT), which has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by San Francisco-based VC NFX.
AMT works by getting its AI agent, dubbed Lyra, to talk to influencers using natural language, helping with tasks like booking campaigns, tracking results, making payments, and answering queries. The company claims Lyra can also autonomously find influencers that match a campaign’s goals.
Tom Hollands, co-founder and CEO of AMT, told TechCrunch he became familiar with the challenge after managing influencer marketing budgets himself. Co-founder Christian Johnston (CTO) previously built adtech data infrastructure.
“The problem in the market today is that the way that you scale influencer marketing is you hire 22-year-olds who are working 20 hours a day, and you load them up with as many partnerships as possible until they break,” Hollands said. “They can’t remember the names of the influencers that they message, and they spend all their time manually following up,” said Hollands.
AMT employs a combination of AI models, including OpenAI’s for general use, Google’s Gemini for multimodal (i.e. analyzing creators’ videos), and Hume AI’s for “tone.” Hollands added, “We use the best model for each task, independent of the provider.”
Hollands argues that because AI can actually “watch” and “understand” influencer content to a degree, it can deliver a much more personalized experience.
“[AI] can actually understand the tone of voice of each influencer,” Hollands said. “It means it’s possible to communicate with one influencer across multiple brands the way [a] partnerships manager would because it has a relationship history of all of these different conversations.”
Launched three months ago, AMT, which is relocating from London to San Francisco, says it has already attracted customers such as Le Petit Luetier, Neoplants, and Wild.
The influencer market is projected to be worth $266.92 billion this year, and traditional influencer marketing SaaS platforms like GRIN and Upfluence, as well as marketplaces like ShopMy and Agentio, require human involvement to run campaigns. These typically charge by seat. AMT’s AI-driven approach, obviously, has drastically different economics, given that far fewer humans are involved.
AMT says it usually takes nine hours of manual work to secure a single influencer partnership, but just five minutes with its platform.
In a statement, Pete Flint, general partner at NFX, added: “AI is fundamentally reshaping industries, and marketing is no exception. AMT’s approach is unique in that it isn’t just building tools, it’s replacing human work with AI, making it an inevitable part of the marketing stack for brands worldwide.”