It seems like short video clips from podcasts, songs, and movies are suddenly everywhere on social media right now, and it’s no accident. Brands have realized that the format offers an extremely cost-effective way to market products.
Brands and marketing agencies often outsource the process of finding the most compelling 30 to 90 seconds of a video, known as “clipping,” to freelancers. But managing these gig workers and determining exactly where to distribute these videos is a huge operational challenge.
Blurreda startup that passed through a16z’s Speedrun accelerator in 2024, is building the infrastructure to automatically handle both the distribution strategy and the logistics of the offtake process. The platform uses a network of over 100,000 concert creators to curate clips and then uses artificial intelligence to determine the best social media platform and target audience to promote them.
Clouted co-founder and CEO Justin Banusing first applied the company’s technology to his personal passion: electronic music and festival production. A longtime DJ, he used Clouted to promote and grow &Friends, a Manila-based electronic dance music and pop culture festival that now attracts over 20,000 people.
Clouted’s approach has caught the interest of investors. The startup just announced a $7 million seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, Peak XV’s Surge and others.
Unlike pure volume-based marketing tools, Clouted doesn’t just go after high clips. Instead, its AI runs a continuous testing loop, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to figure out what really performs best. The practical result is that each campaign makes the next one more targeted and effective as the system gathers data on what works.
Clouted works somewhat like penetration testing for social media algorithms—a concept borrowed from cybersecurity, where researchers probe a system’s defenses by trying to breach them. Instead of looking for security flaws, Clouted’s AI and its network of creators test thousands of different clipping and distribution approaches to identify what causes a piece of content to go viral.
“The result is that every campaign run on Clouted makes the next one faster, smarter and more effective,” Banusing told TechCrunch. “The platform learns which formats are winning, which audiences are converting and which distribution channels are converging over time.”
While Clouted competes directly with similar startups like Overlap AI in the automated clipping space, Banusing said he looks to the bigger marketing infrastructure players, namely CreatorIQ and Hightouch, as the ultimate competition. Hightouch recently surpassed $100 million in ARR, indicating that the enterprise marketing infrastructure space is large and still expanding. This is the market Clouted is ultimately building towards.
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