Clouted, an artificial intelligence marketing platform for the fast-moving brand content economy, nabbed $7 million in seed funding two years after it was founded.
Slow Ventures led the round, with additional participation coming from firms like Westlake-based Gold House Ventures, a16z Speedrun, Weekend Fund and Gondor Capital.
Clouted developed the Virality Engine, a generative artificial intelligent agent that scans through a brand’s marketing materials, turns them into social media campaigns – utilizing every avenue from user generated content to micro influencers – and then develops them.
A brand can feed long-form footage to Clouted’s engine, which will then pinpoint bite-sized clips selected for their virality potential. After Clouted’s community of gig workers work on clipping and editing these videos, Clouted determines when and who should see the clips. After a video campaign gets fully deployed, Clouted analyzes its efficacy to make changes to its algorithm.
“Every campaign Clouted runs makes the next one smarter,” Adriel Yong, the chief operating officer and co-founder of Clouted, said in a statement. “The distribution intelligence platform learns your brand, your audience, and what formats win, then compounds that knowledge over time.”
The world of social commerce
In two years, Clouted has run more than 250 campaigns for music, gaming and consumer brands across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Companies like Clouted are becoming increasingly valuable in social commerce, which directly offers people a platform to purchase tickets, games and merchandise through social media channels, rather than clicking a link and being directed to another website. Brands that live on social media rely on virality, and social commerce makes purchasing easier by removing the friction of clicking out into another website.
Clouted was co-founded by Justin Gorriceta-Banusing, a DJ and festival producer who was trying – and failing – to hitch his content to the virality machine.
“I had great music, great shows, and almost no one seeing them,” Gorriceta-Banusing, the chief executive of Clouted, said in a statement. “I kept asking myself why certain artists blew up and others didn’t – and the answer was never talent. It was always distribution.”
