When a Czech brand books a campaign with an influencer, it usually goes through an agency and manual work. The agency picks the creator, agrees the price, checks the brief and contract, and finally collects the numbers. Buying ads on Google or Meta looks different. The advertiser sets the budget and format, and the system handles the rest. The American startup Agentio argues that this difference is the only thing stopping brand money from moving from the platforms to creators.
The company announced on 18 November 2025 a $40 million Series B round led by the Forerunner fund. Its total capital raised has risen to $56 million, and its valuation to $340 million. Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler and Starting Line also joined the round.
An earlier $12 million Series A was led by Benchmark in November 2024. According to Agentio’s own figures, the company has grown fivefold since then.
How the marketplace works
Agentio is a marketplace where a brand buys a sponsored integration directly into a creator’s video. The platform matches brands with creators based on first-party data about audiences and performance, prices inventory on a CPM basis, and automates briefing, brand safety, content approval, contracts, payments and performance measurement. The founders are Arthur Leopold, formerly president of the talent marketplace Camoe, and Jonathan Meyers, a former Spotify engineer.
Google and Meta ads work because a transaction layer sits between the advertiser and the inventory and automates the purchase. Creators have lacked such a layer until now. That is why, according to Agentio, less than 2% of digital ad spending reached creators as of November 2025.
“Advertising follows attention, and attention has moved to creators. The shift is already happening, brands are moving billions into creator-led marketing. What’s been missing is infrastructure that lets brands scale creator programs the way they can easily scale their search and paid social campaigns,” said Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of Agentio, in the funding announcement.
An investor draws the same parallel. “Just as Google and Meta built platforms to unlock search and social, Agentio is building the infrastructure needed for creator-led ad development and monetization at scale,” said Eurie Kim, a partner at Forerunner, according to the funding announcement. As evidence of performance, the company says the brand Bombas achieved roughly 5.3 times better ROAS through Agentio than with conventional digital video campaigns.
Agentio runs on YouTube and aims at Meta
The platform currently runs on YouTube and is expanding to Meta through its Meta Partnership Ads format. Automated buying only makes sense for a brand if it works across channels. Expanding from one channel to several is a condition for Agentio to compete with the large advertising systems.
According to the funding announcement, the company plans to grow from 35 employees to more than 100 in 2026.
Advertising holding companies build the same layer from the top
Agentio is not the only company building this layer. Publicis Groupe bought the Captiv8 platform in May 2025 and combined it with Influential, which it had acquired earlier for $500 million in July 2024. The combined network counts 15 million creators.
According to an analysis by Storyboard18, advertising holding companies are rebuilding their media, commerce and data stacks around creators, rather than treating influencer marketing as a specialist service.
The difference lies in direction. The holding companies build the infrastructure from the top, as part of their existing media offer. Agentio builds it from the bottom, as a standalone marketplace that creators and brands can access directly. Both aim at the same goal: making creators a standard line item in the media plan.
The Czech market is growing, but buying remains manual
Three different figures show that this is a lot of money. The first is the size of the entire creator economy. Goldman Sachs estimates that it could approach half a trillion dollars by 2027, up from about $250 billion in 2023, with brand deals making up roughly 70% of creators’ income. The second is a narrower slice: global influencer marketing alone reached roughly $32.55 billion in 2025, or about CZK 750 billion.
The third figure describes the Czech market. Spending on influencer marketing here is growing by roughly 20% year on year, driven mainly by large brands, and the number of new creators is rising by around 30% a year. 69% of Czech consumers trust an influencer’s recommendation more than direct advertising from a brand.
Tomáš Urbánek, managing director of TK media, told Hrot that influencer marketing has become a stable part of brands’ strategies. Demand is growing, but in Czechia, buying such a campaign is still manual work through agencies. This is exactly the gap between automated buying of advertising on the large platforms and manual work with creators that Agentio and the advertising holding companies are trying to close.
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