Founded by serial entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, AlleyCorp is both a startup studio and fund that founds companies and invests in early stage companies. AlleyCorp is exclusively focused on investing in transformational companies in New York City. Since its inception, we have launched companies that have raised over $1B+ in funding with an aggregate value of $10B+. As a venture / idea studio, AlleyCorp originates the idea, forms the founding team, funds the initial 6-12 months, launches the company, and maintains integral leadership throughout the company's lifecycle. Some companies that have been founded through AlleyCorp include MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, Nomad Health, Workframe, and CoEdition.  AlleyCorp will also invest in very early stage companies usually as the first seed investor.  Moreover, we believes in supporting first time founders. Our goal is to co-create and invest in truly transformational companies with inspiring leaders.

AlleyCorp

Craft Ventures is an early-stage and growth venture fund specializing in the craft of building great companies. Craft Ventures aims to support and scale innovative companies in various sectors including consumer, enterprise, and financial services. They often invest in companies with a strong founding team, a clear vision, and a scalable business model.

Craft Ventures

Antler is an early-stage venture capital firm that seeks to invest in technology companies. The firm incubates startups from a variety of sectors and offers a global community network of co-founders and access to talent, expert advisors, expansion support, and capital around the world.

Antler

Permanent Capital is to buy and invest in software enabled businesses.

Permanent Capital

Protagonist is an investment management company.

Protagonist

Benchmark invests in and works alongside entrepreneurs building startups into transformational companies. They focus on early-stage venture investing in mobile, marketplaces, social, and infrastructure and enterprise software. Founded in 1995, the firm has offices in Woodside and San Francisco, California. The firm has been recognized for its commitment to open source and is noted for creating the first equal ownership and compensation structure for its partners. The five equal general partners who take board seats and a hands-on approach to every entrepreneur and company they back, with no junior investment staff. Current general partners are Chetan Puttagunta, Sarah Tavel, Victor Lazarte, Peter Fenton, and Eric Vishria. Benchmark has had 37 exits since beginning of 2011; 14 IPOs and 23 M&As representing a total market value of more than $60 billion. Benchmark’s current portfolio of early-stage venture investments includes private market leaders such as Uber, Snapchat, Tinder, Stitch Fix, Elastic and Cyanogen; recent IPOs and acquisitions such as Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, League of Legends, Jasper, OpenTable, New Relic, Hortonworks, Amplitude, Confluent, GrubHub, Zendesk and Zillow; and franchise companies from Juniper to eBay to Red Hat.

Benchmark

Agentio

Agentio is the first ad platform for creator content - we aim to transform the future of advertising. We believe that it should be as easy for brands to buy the most performant and efficient ad unit - starting with YouTube creator integrations - as buying Meta and Google ads. Before Agentio, this wasn’t possible. Agentio is backed by Benchmark (Series A), Craft, and AlleyCorp (Seed), along with leading marketers and creators.  We're ushering in the future of brand and creator partnerships by enabling authenticity and trust to be purchased at scale. We aim to shift a meaningful portion of the $600B digital ad spend market to creators - to enable them to create, build, and live off their work. This isn’t possible without an ad platform that gives advertisers end-to-end automation, which reduces weeks-long processes to seconds. We believe that Agentio can be The Trade Desk of the future, and so much more. We’re looking for the world’s best talent to help us achieve our incredible ambitions, be instrumental in creating a strong culture, and earn ownership in a generational company.

Agentio is an AI-powered advertising platform that automates the process of connecting brands with YouTube creators for sponsored content. The platform enables brands to purchase creator-led ad reads within YouTube videos through an automated bidding system. Using proprietary AI technology, Agentio matches brands with relevant creators, handles brand safety verification, and provides performance measurement capabilities including metrics like impressions, link clicks, QR code scans, and conversion rates through Shopify integration. The platform's AI technology analyzes creator content to determine brand safety and provides risk profiles to brands.

Agentio Raises $4.25 Million To Make Paid Creator Content More Programmatic

Agentio Launches AI-Powered Adtech Platform With $4.25M Seed Funding

Agentio raises $4.25 million to supply YouTube creators with 30

The first ad platform for creator content

Agentio is building a platform for YouTubers to sell ad slots in their videos

Using AI to automate, enhance and optimize marketing activities

Marketing Automation

AGENTIO RAISES $12M SERIES A LED BY BENCHMARK TO FURTHER TRANSFORM CREATOR-LED ADVERTISING WITH AI TECHNOLOGY

Agentio is an AI-powered advertising technology platform that aims to simplify the process of purchasing sponsored content from online creators, particularly on YouTube. Launched in November 2023, the company's solution leverages artificial intelligence to automate the process of matching brands with relevant creators and facilitating the creation and distribution of sponsored ad content.
Agentio's platform allows marketers to access a network of content creators with highly engaged audiences. Its AI technology uses predictive models to match brands with creators relevant to their target audience. The platform enables creators to list their available ad inventory in real-time, allowing brands to automatically bid on and purchase these ad slots as soon as they become available.
Agentio's initial offering focuses on facilitating the creation and distribution of sponsored ad reads within YouTube videos, typically 30 seconds or longer in duration. Creators on Agentio's platform record these ad reads and upload them for approval by the brand before being integrated into their video content.
The company's goal is to make buying creator content as seamless as purchasing ads on platforms like Facebook and Google. By leveraging end-to-end automation, Agentio aims to deliver authentic and high-performing ad content at scale across various social channels.
Key customers and partnerships
In November 2023, Agentio was in beta testing with a network of YouTube creators, including prominent creators like Cody Ko and Nick DiGiovanni, who had already utilized the platform to sell ad space within their videos. While specific details on key brand customers were not provided, the company stated that it was targeting its pitch to YouTube's top advertisers and prioritizing onboarding creators relevant to those brands.

Agentio is an AI-powered advertising platform that automates the process of connecting brands with YouTube creators for sponsored content. The platform enables brands to purchase creator-led ad reads within YouTube videos through an automated bidding system. Using proprietary AI technology, Agentio matches brands with relevant creators, handles brand safety verification, and provides performance measurement capabilities including metrics like impressions, link clicks, QR code scans, and conversion rates through Shopify integration. The platform's AI technology analyzes creator content to determine brand safety and provides risk profiles to brands.The platform charges brands a 20% fee on their ad spend while creators can list their inventory without any charges. The company intended to expand its capabilities beyond YouTube to additional social channels from 2025.Key customers and partnershipsThe platform has ~50 brands and over 1,000 creators, operating on an invite-only basis. The platform enables brands to access over 1 billion YouTube ad views per month.&nbsp;Notable customers include DoorDash, Mint Mobile, MasterClass, Notion, HelloFresh, Bombas, and Mejuri. On the creator side, Agentio has partnered with notable YouTubers such as Nick DiGiovanni, Matty Matheson, Rhett &amp; Link, and Chad Chad.&nbsp;Key competitors: None comparable (Agentio is the only startup in our coverage that provides an Ad platform that's specialized for connecting with creators for creator-led marketing content)&nbsp;

Outbrain is an algorithm-based content recommendation and discovery platform that curates native advertising content from the open web, providing personalized content for brands to increase customer engagement. Outbrain also allows content publishers to amplify its reach by supplying content to the platform. As of September 2023, customers could access 7,000+ online content sources including content by the Washington Post, Guardian, and BBC.&nbsp;Outbrain has been a pioneer in the content recommendation space and was the first to introduce an algorithm-based content recommendation in 2008. It was also the first to introduce a self-service platform for content recommendation in 2012. In May 2021, it tested “QualityRatings,” a tool that implements quality guidelines for the content featured on its platform while using machine learning and AI to create a more personalized user experience. In September 2022, the firm launched <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13122">Keystone</a>, a business optimization solution for publishers.&nbsp;Outbrain has made a series of acquisitions over the years while making enhancements to its product offerings. In November 2021, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6992">Outbrain acquired vi</a>, a contextual video intelligence platform for USD 55 million to grow its CTV and other display ads offerings. In August 2024, Outbrain acquired <a href="https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/outbrain-acquires-teads-from-altice-for-1-billion/">Teads</a>, an SSP and video monetization company, to create an "end-to-end, full-funnel platform" by expanding into TV, video, and CTV advertising.&nbsp; Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;Outbrain’s customers include leading news media outlets such as CNN, MSN, and Sky News, serving more than a billion monthly users (by December 2022).&nbsp;&nbsp;In April 2022, Outbrain’s platform was <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9907">integrated with ID5</a> to provide a privacy-first customer identification solution.

Outbrain

Marin Software is an adTech firm offering a suite of solutions for brands looking to conduct search, social media, and ecommerce advertising. The firm’s “MarineOne” solution enables Brands to integrate their data under a single platform; coupled with machine learning tools, marketers can optimize ad spending across multiple platforms. In the case of search and social media advertising, Brands can increase their visibility across a number of search engines and social media platforms including Google, Facebook, and Apple Search Ads.&nbsp;In recent years the firm has been making enhancements to transform its Marine One Software as a complete marketing campaign management &amp; intelligence solution. In line with the firm expanded its ecommerce advertising solution capabilities by increasing the number of integrations to include Criteo’s commerce media platform and Instacart’s advertising platform. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12159">2022</a>, the firm rolled out a number of new product and features including 1) MarinOne bidding, the firm's ad bidding marketplace, 2) MarinOne support, to enable advertisers to improve ad performance with multi-edit ad scheduling solutions, 3) social rules engine, to help automate workflows, and 4) <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15019">Budget Optimizer</a>, an ad budget management solution. More recently, in April 2023, the firm introduced an automation tool <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17565">“MarinOne Scripts,”</a> which integrates Python scripting with its MarineOne platform, providing marketers with customized and data-driven solutions to optimize campaigns.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsAs of October 2021, several brands from varied industries, including Nissan, American Eagle outfitters, and Harmony, use the firm’s solutions.In 2021, the firm made a number of new initiatives in 2021, including an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7635">integration with Amazon Ads</a> and a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6973">partnership with CitrusAd </a>to expand the ecommerce capabilities of its platform. In January 2023, the company announced an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16172">integration with Yahoo</a> to broaden access to programmatic ad content.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Marin Software

Founded in China, Terminus claims to have the first account-based marketing (ABM) platform that unifies the marketing and sales teams’ roles under a single platform. Terminus specializes in B2B marketing and, according to the firm, its “Terminus Data Studio” has one of the largest B2B account databases, which by September 2021, covered more than 70 million businesses. Terminus’s customer data platform (CDP) is fully integrated with its marketing automation platform, through which teams can run multi-channel targeted campaigns across many channels including email, ad networks, live chat, and the web. This can then be analyzed with Terminus’ suite of analytics and attribution tools. By September 2021, Terminus served more than 1,000 customers, including Salesloft, Foundry, and Quantum Workplace.According to a study done by Forrester (in Q2 2020), Terminus has been recognized among the ABM platform leaders.Through a series of acquisitions, Terminus has transformed into a marketing cloud platform offering a range of services. Its two latest acquisitions took place within 12 months. In November 2020, it acquired Growflare, a lead generation and account-based intelligence platform catering to B2B startups, followed by B2B CDP Zylotech in September 2021. Terminus hoped to capitalize on these to build the most comprehensive ABM platform on the market.

Terminus

Founded in France, Brevo <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18241">(formerly Sendinblue)</a> began as an email marketing automation platform catering to small and medium-scale businesses (SMB). It has since extended its services to become an all-in-one marketing platform; the range of services found on Brevo's platform include email and SMS marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, landing page creation, and Facebook ad management, among others. In November 2022, the firm launched an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/14388">integrated meetings solution</a> that brings together scheduling, video conferencing, and payment solutions. In March 2023, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17462">unveiled “Conversations”</a> to manage customer conversations across messaging channels in one centralized location.Brevo’s platform is compared with other well-known competitors such as Mailchimp and Hubspot and is commended for its live support and fair pricing, making it a strong contender in the SMB space.&nbsp;The company has expanded its product offering through a series of acquisitions during 2021-2022. Brevo acquired three firms in September 2021 for USD 47 million: 1) Metrilo, a provider of customer analytics and marketing services for ecommerce stores, 2) Chatra, a live chat messenger app for increasing online sales, and 3) PushOwl, a customer re-engagement website that uses web-based push notifications. In March 2022, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9009">acquired MeetFox</a>, a meeting scheduling and video conferencing platform. In September 2022, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13360">acquired Yodel.io,</a> an Austrian cloud-based phone system provider, to enable additional customer touchpoints, and reduce the overall digital marketing spend for SMBs. More recently, in February 2023, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16271?industryIds=62">acquired Captain Wallet,</a> a mobile wallet marketing platform, to broaden its reach internationally. In December 2023, Brevo acquired <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24833">WonderPush and Octolis,</a> two customer interaction platforms, to expand its CRM capabilities.&nbsp;&nbsp;The firm achieved <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15834">USD 100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)</a> at the end of 2022 while maintaining a positive EBITDA position.&nbsp;Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;The platform catered to 500,000+ customers across 180 countries as of end December 2022.

Brevo

Acquia provides a digital experience platform (DXP) to support medium to large enterprises that use Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS) that provides the back-end infrastructure for websites and by September 2021, powered approximately 2.1% of websites on the internet. The core product offered by Acquia is a marketing cloud that provides a full suite of services to manage the customer journey. The platform features a customer data platform (CDP), unifying data across multiple sources; sales automation tools to deliver personalized marketing campaigns across multiple delivery channels; marketing campaign management tools to manage distributed marketing teams; and a content management platform to organize and monitor content.&nbsp;Having been built on the Drupal framework, which does not require any programming skills to implement, Acquia’s marketing cloud claims to be more accessible and agile than enterprise cloud solutions provided by incumbents such as Adobe and Oracle. In 2021, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report named Acquia a leader in DXP platforms, while a study done by Forrester (in July 2021) found that customers of Acquia’s DXP solutions experienced a payback on their investment in less than six months, generating an average return on investment (ROI) of 589% over three years.&nbsp;Acquia has made several investments and enhancements to its DXP platform. In January 2021, Acquia, in partnership with Commercetools and Lucidworks, launched “Acquia Digital Commerce,” a service for creating personalized digital shopping experiences for customers. The firm has also added a number of self-serve features to its CDP such as&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11422">“right to erasure”</a> to bolster the privacy and security features of its platform to cater to enterprise users. In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/35334">October 2024,</a> Acquia added AI capabilities to digital asset management solutions to accelerate campaign delivery.&nbsp;In September 2021, Acquia acquired Widen Enterprises, a digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software company, for an undisclosed amount. As a result, customers can have a fully integrated experience on the platform, while the acquisition also added a further 700+ customers. In November 2023, the company acquired Monsido, a website accessibility and optimization solution from CivicPlus, to expand its platform capabilities.&nbsp;In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/36365">November 2024,&nbsp;</a>Acquia acquired Monsid to expand Acquia's digital experience platform capabilities.Key customers and partnershipsBy September 2021, Acquia counted one in four Fortune 500 companies, including Johnson &amp; Johnson, Bayer, and Xerox, among its customers.&nbsp;As of September 2024, the company served more than 4,000 customers globally.&nbsp;In June 2022, Acquia&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11352">partnered with Workato</a> (enterprise-level workflow automation platform) to integrate with Acquia’s CDP to expand enterprise use of the platform. The integration added 100+ technology integrations compatible with Acquia’s marketing cloud.&nbsp;

Acquia

Firms positioned as an 'all-in-one' marketing platform,  providing a variety of functions across the MarTech stack

Startups providing platforms for planning and managing marketing campaigns.

Startups offering tools for finding and attracting potential customers with targeted ads.

Startups providing tools to automate the execution of marketing campaigns across varied channels.

Startups providing tools for gathering, cleaning, and enhancing customer data to provide deep analytics. This also includes firms offering account-based marketing (ABM) solutions to drive targeted and personalized campaigns.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for marketing

Personalization tools are mainly used in AdTech and marketing campaign automation

Marketing automation provides measurement and attribution solutions to measure marketing effectiveness

Uses GenAI to automate content creation  and personalize content for marketing campaigns

Uses AI/ML to enable marketing automation, making it a core part of many companies' products

Metaverse advertising is being explored by AdTech segments for in-game advertising

The in-game advertising segment is in development and has a niche relevance to this area

<div>
 Agentio, a YouTube ad marketplace, has successfully raised USD 12 million in Series A funding. The funding round was led by Benchmark, and included contributions from returning investors Craft Ventures and AlleyCorp. The company's total funding raised so far has exceeded USD 16 million.
 The newly acquired funds will be used to expand Agentio's marketplace for YouTube creators. Additionally, the funds will be employed to improve the company's AI technology. This technology is integral in establishing brand safety for creators.
 Agentio has developed an AI-powered advertising platform that links brands with online creators. This enables the scaling of sponsored content campaigns. The platform is specifically designed to work with YouTube Creator-led sponsored ad reads. Agentio uses predictive algorithms to pair up suitable brands and creators and to give real-time performance metrics.
 
</div>

Agentio

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