A recent report from social media marketing platform Emplifi, which analyzed Instagram content and surveyed 165 influencers, revealed that micro-influencers with up to 50k followers might offer brands the best return on investment.

Hypefy, a Croatian tech startup, has thus built an AI-powered platform to elevate micro-influencer marketing by automating the entire process of matching brands with micro-influencers, from creator selection and pricing to campaign management and performance tracking. The company serves major brands, including Nivea, Philips, and PepsiCo.

"We wanted to build this platform using math, engineering, and computer science,” explains Hypefy co-founder and CEO Stjepan Zelić, whose background as a computer scientist rather than marketer shaped the platform’s development. "We wanted to build something that does this work better than humans."

Solving the Micro-Influencer Scale Challenge

Stjepan highlights that the complexity of managing micro-influencer campaigns creates a market inefficiency where brands default to mega-influencers despite potentially better performance from micro-creators.

According to him, the core problem in influencer marketing is deceptively straightforward: while micro-influencers often have more engaged, targeted audiences, managing multiple smaller creators requires considerably more resources than working with a single mega-influencer. 

"Since the process is a bit complicated, it takes much more effort to have 20 small creators as opposed to one big creator," explains Stjepan.

Describing their mission to redistribute marketing budgets, Stjepan refers to Hypefy as the “Robin Hood of influencer marketing.” 

"We tend to take the budget that's usually going towards the megastars and spreading it to micro-nano influencers...those guys don't get enough offers and don't utilize their full potential."

Unlike traditional platforms that offer search engines, marketplaces, or basic campaign management tools, Hypefy takes a radically different approach through complete automation.

Transforming Campaign Management Through Complete Automation

"As a brand, when you use Hypefy, you're used to choosing who you work with, how much you pay them, and why you work with this combination of people. You don't get to do that through Hypefy," Stjepan explains. 

Instead, brands provide three inputs: a one-sentence product description, target geography, and budget. The platform's AI executes a comprehensive process that begins with analyzing audience demographics and engagement patterns across its creator network. 

From there, it identifies creators whose followers match the brand's target audience and automatically handles all pricing, negotiations, and creator outreach. The system then manages campaign execution, tracks performance, and generates insights that inform future campaign optimization.

"Only specific creators that have the audience that we're targeting get an invite to Hypefy," Stjepan emphasizes. "Contrary to many marketplaces or platforms, if you as a creator sign up to Hypefy, you won't get an offer until you're a great match with the brand. We want to prevent the wrong people from getting paired with the wrong brands."

The platform even generates AI-powered creative briefs and mood boards, though Stjepan notes with humor that "the people in the images sometimes have three hands or six fingers, which is still a thing." 

Nevertheless, this automation also extends to payment processing, with creators typically receiving compensation within 30 days of campaign completion.

Proven Results with Major Brands

The effectiveness of this automated approach is evident in Hypefy's performance metrics. Beyond the viral success of their campaign with German drugstore chain DM, where one micro-influencer reached 1.3 million views, the platform has delivered consistent results for global brands.

"Out of all of our customers that ran at least two campaigns...90% in the three years are still with us," Stjepan reveals. Even global giants like McDonald's have seen measurable impact, with one campaign driving a 5% revenue increase in its target market.

One particularly illustrative success story involves a chocolate cookie brand: "One of them went viral because she froze the cookies in the freezer, which they're not intended for, but she froze them anyway. Her audiences, her followers reacted like crazy." The brand then built its next campaign entirely around this insight, resulting in an 80% performance improvement over its previous campaign.

Strategic Growth Through Recent Funding

These demonstrated successes with major brands have attracted significant investor attention. Hypefy recently secured a €1.75 million funding round led by U.S. billionaire Thomas Peterffy, drawn to the company's unique technical approach to solving influencer marketing challenges. 

The funding has enabled Hypefy to double its team to 19 people and accelerate U.S. market expansion. 

"We want to grow massively, and we've been growing at a quick, really quick pace," Stjepan notes. "This round helped us expand quicker, get more features out, and make the platform more enjoyable for the influencers and the businesses as well."

Automated Influencer Marketing For the Win

While Hypefy's automation is sophisticated, Stjepan clarifies that its goal isn't to replace human creativity. 

"I don't think AI-generated influencers will make a massive change [in] influencer marketing," he states. "I'm all for authenticity...little imperfections and details...are what makes humans interesting."

The platform's success in matching creators with aligned brand opportunities has shown that automation can enhance authenticity rather than diminish it. 

"What we noticed was missing," Stjepan explains, "is that it's tough to do. You gotta have a lot of experience and luck, and some systems help you do it, but there's nothing that will completely do it instead of you, aside from agencies."

Looking ahead, Stjepan sees Hypefy democratizing access to influencer marketing: "We're going to make content creator economy even more lucrative to work in because a lot of new influencers will now get the opportunity to try and make a living out of their creativity."

As brands seek more efficient ways to work with micro-influencers and creators look for meaningful monetization opportunities, Hypefy's data-driven approach to automating influencer marketing appears positioned to address both needs. 

"Get ready for us to disrupt the market," Stjepan concludes, and given the platform's early success with major brands and strong client retention, this technology-first approach to scaling micro-influencer campaigns delivers measurable results.