Astute is a platform that helps B2B companies work with newsletter, podcast, and social media creators. The company has raised $1.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round.
The funding round was backed by Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, along with several strategic angel investors.
Astute was founded by Vida Stanić and Abhishek Manikandan. The company helps B2B businesses promote their products and services through newsletters, podcasts, and social media.
As more people move away from traditional marketing channels such as advertising, PR, and search, Astute wants to make it easier for businesses to find the right creators and build partnerships with them.
The platform uses two AI agents to manage creator partnerships. One works like a talent manager for creators, while the other helps B2B companies find creators, plan partnerships, and manage marketing campaigns.
Astute says its technology monitors more than one million creator posts every minute to find discussions about businesses and their competitors. It also helps companies find partnership opportunities and track results such as impressions, conversions, brand visibility, and visibility in AI-powered search engines.
“For years, B2B marketing relied on ads, PR and SEO. But audiences have moved to new media channels — newsletters, podcasts, LinkedIn, X. In direct-to-consumer space, that shift turned influencer marketing into one of the biggest line items in the budget. B2B is next, “said Vida Stanić, founder and CEO of Astute.
Stanić said that one of the biggest challenges for B2B companies is finding and connecting with the right creators. She experienced this problem herself while working in growth roles. Astute aims to make this process easier by automating much of the work.
Astute can help businesses find creators, contact them, manage partnerships, and track campaign results. This allows companies to spend less time handling these tasks manually.
The company believes distribution is becoming more important as AI makes it easier to build new products and increases competition in the technology industry. Astute also expects creator content to become more important for AI-powered search and recommendation tools as AI agents increasingly help people discover products and companies.
