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The process of booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is not easy. To an extent, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. Similarly, 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. Hence, the relevance of AI-powered influencer marketing in today’s world.
Put simply, the creator marketing ecosystem is being held back in many ways by the old-world ad-marketing agency model. It is easier if an AI-powered influencer marketing chatbot could do all the heavy lifting, interacting naturally with an influencer via a platform that can scale across hundreds of ad campaigns.
That’s the reason for Agentic Marketing Technologies (AMT), which raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by San Francisco-based VC NFX.
AMT—the AI-powered influencer market—works by getting its AI agent, 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, said he became familiar with the challenge after managing influencer marketing budgets himself. Co-founder Christian Johnston (CTO) previously built ad tech data infrastructure.
“The problem in the market today is that the way that you scale influencer marketing is that 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 they message, and they spend all their time manually following up,” said Hollands.
This AI-powered influencer marketing employs a combination of AI models, including OpenAI for general use, Google’s Gemini for multimodal (i.e., analyzing creators’ videos), and Hume AI 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 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 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-powered influencer marketing approach has drastically different economics, given that 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.”
While AMT has come to ease users in marketing, the continuous evolution of agentic AI in healthcare, architecture, and other facets of life is a new development for the human race. It looks acceptable even as we anticipate further developments.
