Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they can engage at any one time.

Put simply, the creator marketing ecosystem is being held back in many ways by the old-world ad/marketing agency model. Wouldn’t it be easier if an AI chatbot could do all the heavy lifting, interacting naturally with an influencer via a platform that’s able to scale across hundreds of ad campaigns? 

That’s the idea behind the company Agentic Marketing Technologies (AMT), which has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by San Francisco-based VC NFX.

AMT works by getting its AI agent, dubbed Lyra, to talk to influencers using natural language, helping with tasks like booking campaigns, tracking results, making payments, and answering queries. The company claims Lyra can also autonomously find influencers that match a campaign’s goals.

Tom Hollands, co-founder and CEO of AMT, told TechCrunch he became familiar with the challenge after managing influencer marketing budgets himself. Co-founder Christian Johnston (CTO) previously built adtech data infrastructure.

“The problem in the market today is that the way that you scale influencer marketing is you hire 22-year-olds who are working 20 hours a day, and you load them up with as many partnerships as possible until they break,” Hollands said. “They can’t remember the names of the influencers that they message, and they spend all their time manually following up,” said Hollands.

AMT employs a combination of AI models, including OpenAI’s for general use, Google’s Gemini for multimodal (i.e. analyzing creators’ videos), and Hume AI’s for “tone.” Hollands added, “We use the best model for each task, independent of the provider.”

Hollands argues that because AI can actually “watch” and “understand” influencer content to a degree, it can deliver a much more personalized experience.

“[AI] can actually understand the tone of voice of each influencer,” Hollands said. “It means it’s possible to communicate with one influencer across multiple brands the way [a] partnerships manager would because it has a relationship history of all of these different conversations.”

Launched three months ago, AMT, which is relocating from London to San Francisco, says it has already attracted customers such as Le Petit Luetier, Neoplants, and Wild.

The influencer market is projected to be worth $266.92 billion this year, and traditional influencer marketing SaaS platforms like GRIN and Upfluence, as well as marketplaces like ShopMy and Agentio, require human involvement to run campaigns. These typically charge by seat. AMT’s AI-driven approach, obviously, has drastically different economics, given that far fewer humans are involved.

AMT says it usually takes nine hours of manual work to secure a single influencer partnership, but just five minutes with its platform.

In a statement, Pete Flint, general partner at NFX, added: “AI is fundamentally reshaping industries, and marketing is no exception. AMT’s approach is unique in that it isn’t just building tools, it’s replacing human work with AI, making it an inevitable part of the marketing stack for brands worldwide.”

President Trump fired the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, setting up a challenge to a 1935 Supreme Court precedent prohibiting the firing of FTC commissioners for reasons other than “good cause.”

The White House terminated commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya earlier Tuesday, The New York Times reported. In a statement, Slaughter called the firings “illegal.”

“Today the president illegally fired me from my position as a federal trade commissioner, violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent,” Slaughter said. “Why? Because I have a voice. And he is afraid of what I’ll tell the American people.”

The FTC, which typically has five members, was established in 1914 and is charged with enforcing consumer protection and antitrust laws. The Trump administration has aggressively challenged the authority of independent regulatory agencies, including the FTC.

Y Combinator-backed Nigerian food procurement startup Vendease has changed its employee pay structure and is seeking fresh capital, TechCrunch has learned.

This is after laying off 44% of its workforce — around 120 employees —last month, marking its second round of job cuts in five months. In the latest development, the startup has now replaced employees’ traditional salaries with a performance-based pay system, supplemented by an Equity Share Option Plan (ESOP), according to internal documents seen by TechCrunch.

The five-year-old startup, which raised $30 million in its Series A round led by Partech Africa and TLcom Capital, said the restructuring was necessary to navigate to profitability.

Vendease’s new compensation model includes a five-phase salary recovery plan, the documents say.

In February, all employees received a ₦140,000 (~$90) salary, regardless of previous pay. From March to May, the company will raise employees’ wages to 30% of former levels if they meet performance targets, though it hasn’t specified these targets, the documents say. 

Compensation will increase to 60% of former salaries from June to August and 90% from September to November, with full salary restoration expected by December again contingent on company and employee performance goals.

The unpaid portions of the salaries will convert into share options under the ESOP, with 50% vesting over ten months and the rest over three years. But employees can only exercise these options at a board-approved fair market value, according to the employee agreement.

The company confirmed the changes to employee pay insisting that it is now at a break even point, even close to profitability. 

“Vendease has restructured both its business and operations. We’re a software company, and we want to focus on facilitating OPEX-heavy operations with technology rather than handling them ourselves,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

It says the changes are intended to encourage employee productivity while the company grows more financially sustainable. “We only spend what we earn, which keeps us consistently at break-even and focused on profitability,” the spokesperson added.

With slightly over 150 employees left, Vendease is betting on internal restructuring, fresh capital, and AI-driven efficiency to cut costs and sustain operations. As the company points out, this also means focusing more on software-driven growth and doubling down on its sales and payments solutions and credit marketplace while gradually phasing out warehousing and logistics operations.

Betting on BNPL to stay afloat

Founded in 2019 by Tunde Kara, Olumide Fayankin, Gatumi Aliyu, and Wale Oyepeju, Vendease set out to streamline food procurement for African restaurants and food businesses. 

The startup claimed it could eliminate inefficiencies in the food supply chain, which cost businesses billions annually. By 2022, it had moved 400,000 metric tonnes of food for over 2,000 customers, it said, saving them $2 million in procurement costs and cutting wastage-related losses by nearly $500,000 in Nigeria, its main market.