Through their automated platform, New York-based startup Agentio has developed a system that standardizes how brands purchase creator content. Founded by Arthur Leopold, former Cameo president, and Jonathan Meyers, former Spotify executive, the company bridges the significant gap between traditional digital advertising budgets and creator marketing spending.

From Cameo to a New Vision for Creator Content

Arthur’s insights from his time at Cameo shaped his vision for Agentio. “I helped start Cameo, the celebrity video shout-out app, and joined as the first employee and one of the first investors,” he recalls. “We democratized access to celebrities and saw what technology can enable and the power of technology in breaking down historically very high barriers.”

While launching Cameo for Business, Arthur identified a crucial market inefficiency. “I learned in conversations with folks at media agencies and CMOs that for there to be a real shift in the way that brands work with creators today, you needed to shift digital ad spend dollars, working media dollars, to creators,” he explains, adding that this insight highlighted a striking disparity: digital ad spending commands approximately $600 billion while the influencer and talent budget remains limited to about $15-20 billion.

Tackling Brand-Creator Connection Challenges

The fragmented nature of creator marketing presents significant obstacles. “The way to buy creator content today is much akin to the Wild West,” Arthur says. “It is archaic, fragmented, and opaque, and there’s a lot of incentive through the buying process to increase friction. Because of that, it makes it challenging for brands to work with creators.”

Arthur and Jonathan, who previously led Spotify’s growth and innovation engineering organization, identified an opportunity to improve this process. “Spotify was very lucky in that it had this incredible pool of creator and listener data, which enabled their advertising campaigns to be 30% more efficient than what it had historically done,” Arthur explains. “We wanted to understand where there was a similar data set.”

Arthur Leopold Jonathan Meyers

Data-Informed Innovation

The platform’s foundation emerged from insights into data analysis. “Large language models came to be, and we realized that we could understand creators through the content that they produce, through the things they share with us, and through the demographics of their audiences,” Arthur shares. “We could enable a brand to just as easily target and work with the perfect creator through our deep semantic understanding of all their content and data.”

This approach has delivered significant results. “We’ve seen brands spend $500,000 on Agentio within 48 hours get to work with 40+ of the world’s best creators for multi-video deals,” Arthur notes. “That would take a typical influencer team six plus months to negotiate across 40 different creators, and a whole process of a lot of no’s, of trying to figure out the right price, and thousands of emails of back and forth.”

Transparent Business Model

Agentio prioritizes transparency and creator earnings. “One of the challenges that the space has today is this opacity regarding pricing and how much the creators are getting paid,” Arthur explains. “We were very transparent about our business model.” 

The platform takes 20% of ad spend, with creators receiving 80%,” which Arthur describes as “exponentially better than their YouTube AdSense.”

This approach has attracted premier brands. “Because of what we’ve unlocked and enabled with this new level of scale, we’re able to work with brands who historically haven’t touched the space,” Arthur says. “These are brands like DoorDash, Warby Parker, MasterClass, Mejuri, Bombas Socks, and Mint Mobile, which are truly Tier 1 brands that creators adore and are so excited to work with.”

Video credit: Caroline Winkler

The platform streamlines the entire process. “A brand can buy integrations with creators where a creator shares why they love a product and why their audience should consider it,” Arthur explains. “A brand can buy that as easily as a Meta or Google ad. We do this through technology we’ve built that automates matching, negotiation, and brand safety checks, then taking the actual performance data to make the campaigns much more efficient.”

Campaign scalability demonstrates the model’s effectiveness. “We’ve unlocked a new scalable ad channel for brands akin to them spending on Snap, Pinterest, or Uber for the first time,” Arthur notes, adding that client retention and growth underscore this success: “Almost every brand on the platform is actively increasing spend. We saw a 2.35x average spend increase from our Q3 advertisers to Q4. And we’ve hit profitability.”

Creator Experience and Success

Agentio carefully curates its creator onboarding process. “We are very much a closed platform,” Arthur explains. “We will only onboard creators when they have an active brand opportunity. That’s important because we need to know that the creators are reliable, convert well for other brands, and will be a good fit for a brand with which their content is aligned.”

The platform standardizes pricing through a clear approach. “We use a CPM multiplied against the creator’s historical median views,” Arthur explains. “If the creator’s historical views are 100,000 views and the brand is spending at a $40 CPM, the brand is sending out a bid for $4,000. This is important because today, managers or agents, creators, and brands alike don’t know how to price creators. It is very much a finger-in-the-wind situation.”

Once onboarded, creators directly access brand opportunities. “Our team works with the leading management firms, works with thousands of creators directly when there’s an active opportunity,” Arthur shares. “Once they’re on, they’ll start receiving bids from dozens of the best brands in the world on Agentio.”

Arthur emphasizes sustainable pricing over short-term gains. “What we often see with creators, and frankly, we won’t onboard creators when we do see this, is that most will take many one-off deals and would rather take a much higher price initially, which only makes it harder for them to succeed with a brand, and build a long-term relationship with the brand,” he notes. 

“Maybe you’re getting a deal for $7,000 instead of $10,000, and because you initially priced yourself at $7,000, you might get many more deals from that brand as you’re more likely to convert and perform for them. Creators and their teams need to think much longer-term, which will benefit them, the brands, and the ecosystem.”

The platform has generated impressive creator success stories. “We’ve seen creators who have received bids for 2025 for two videos per month renewals that are multi-month, multi-quarter renewals. That happens all the time on Agentio,” Arthur shares.

Market Success and Investment

Since launching in October 2023, the platform has shown strong growth. “We hit escape velocity in the spring of 2024,” Arthur shares. “All of a sudden, we weren’t just tapping into brands’ testing budgets, but their evergreen budgets, which is the holy grail to tap into.”

The metrics demonstrate market validation. “We started to see that a sizable percentage of creators were selling through all of their deals and open inventory on Agentio within six months of launching the platform,” Arthur explains. “Creators who were joining were receiving sometimes four and five and six bids from tier one brands on a single piece of inventory for an ad integration.”

The industry vet adds that the investment from Benchmark validates Agentio’s approach. “If you look at the past few years, Benchmark invested in two or three companies each year,” Arthur explains. “And they only invest in companies they believe will define a category and change how people work and approach it. That’s why they were the first investors in Uber, eBay, Zillow, OpenTable, Snap, etc.”

As for the industry’s future, Arthur is bullish. “The creator economy will continue to be arguably one of the most important drivers of economic freedom and economic empowerment worldwide, so long as it is easy or easier for creators to live off their work. That’s what we’re solving for,” he concludes.