Astute’s $1.2M bet makes B2B creator deals feed AI discovery

Astute closed an oversubscribed $1.2 million pre-seed round and launched its dual-AI platform that helps B2B companies find, book and measure partnerships with newsletter writers, podcast hosts and social creators. The raise, backed by Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator plus angels, arrives as the company positions creator channels as core distribution rather than side experiments.

Founders Vida Stanić and Abhishek Manikandan built the system around two agents that sit on opposite sides of the same marketplace. One handles admin for creators. The other acts as a new-media manager for brands, scanning more than one million creator posts per minute for mentions of the company and its competitors.

Investors back the first B2B new media company claim

The round came in at roughly €1.03 million and was oversubscribed. Lead backer Flyer One Ventures, which backs early-stage CEE and Ukrainian founders, described Astute as building the first B2B new media company that can connect brands with creators, write the strategy and lock the deals.

Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund and New York’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator joined alongside strategic angels. The capital funds the public launch of Astute’s B2B new media platform, engineering infrastructure and automated sourcing tools aimed at enterprise brands that want scale across niche independent channels.

Stanić, the CEO, put the shift in plain terms. “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,” she said.

Two AI agents run opposite sides of every deal

The product design is deliberately two-sided. The creator-side agent functions as a talent manager, taking the paperwork, rate negotiations and scheduling load off newsletter operators and podcast hosts. The brand-side agent researches a company’s site, maps the creators its buyers already trust, builds partnership strategies and executes campaigns.

Opportunities the system is built to surface and manage include:

• Editorial placements and guest interviews
• Podcast appearances and sponsored segments
• Paid advertising inside newsletters and social feeds
• Event collaborations and joint content series

After the deal runs, the platform tracks impressions, conversions, brand visibility scores and, crucially, visibility inside AI-powered search and recommendation engines. That last metric is where the second-order bet lives.

Founders already lived both sides of the table

Stanić previously led growth at Fluidstack during the period the AI infrastructure company moved from a $2 million to a $2 billion valuation in under a year. She spent real hours hunting Substack contact forms and pitching creators by hand, the exact friction Astute now automates.

Manikandan, the CTO, arrived from the other direction. An Oxford graduate and former machine-learning engineer at The Trade Desk, he built an engineering audience on YouTube that crossed 15 million views. He knows what creator-side admin feels like when brands come calling.

There is no better team to be building this company. Vida has been the marketer who needed this and could not buy it. Abhishek has been the creator on the other end of the table. But beyond the founder market fit, as a team they have a winning combination of ambition, resilience and talent that we love backing at F1V.

Vital Laptenok, general partner at Flyer One Ventures, said that after the round closed.

B2B influencer budgets already run into the billions

The timing sits inside a measurable budget shift. Industry tallies for 2026 show B2B brands pouring serious money into creator programs while the wider influencer market sits near $33 billion.

According to one 2026 data set, B2B brands allocated $4.1 billion to influencer programs, a 47 percent jump from the prior year. LinkedIn remains the dominant channel at roughly 78 percent of B2B influencer activity, followed by X, YouTube, podcasts and newsletter sponsorships. Eighty-six percent of B2B marketers say they plan to raise those budgets further.

That money still moves through fragmented inboxes and spreadsheets at most companies. Astute’s pitch is that the process can look more like buying media and less like cold outreach.

Creator mentions start mattering to AI discovery systems

The deeper claim is about what happens after the human audience leaves. As generative AI agents play a larger role in product research and shortlists, the independent sources those systems crawl gain new weight. A credible newsletter mention or podcast appearance can surface later as a citation or training signal inside AI answers.

Astute tracks that visibility explicitly. The company argues that when AI lowers the cost of building products, distribution becomes the scarce resource. Creator-generated content is one of the few channels that can still create durable trust and, increasingly, machine-readable reputation.

In other words, the same partnerships that reach a CFO listening to a niche podcast also plant the brand inside the corpus AI tools consult. That is the second-order effect the $1.2 million is meant to capture.

Brands get speed, creators get a talent manager

For marketing teams the immediate gain is time. Discovery, outreach, contracting and reporting collapse into one workflow instead of a dozen tools and manual lists. Performance data covers both classic campaign metrics and the newer AI-search layer.

For creators the pitch is cleaner commercial plumbing. Rates become more transparent, admin drops, and B2B brands that once felt unreachable start arriving with structured briefs. The platform effectively supplies the talent-manager layer most independent operators never hire.

Similar B2B infrastructure bets are appearing across other operational gaps. One recent example is another B2B tooling raise this cycle focused on WhatsApp order flows; another is the white-label travel infrastructure play that also targets fragmented B2B distribution. Astute applies the same infrastructure logic to media relationships.

Key platform claims at launch:

• 1 million+ creator posts monitored per minute for brand and competitor signals
• Two specialized AI agents covering both marketplace sides
• Metrics that include impressions, conversions, brand score and AI-search visibility
• Support for editorial, advertising, podcast and event formats

The longer plan moves past single partnerships

Stanić and Manikandan have already sketched the next stage. Once individual creator deals run reliably, the platform aims to help B2B companies build their own brands, credibility and owned audiences rather than renting attention forever.

That path mirrors what the strongest consumer brands did after influencer marketing matured: treat creators as a permanent media channel, then layer owned properties on top. Astute wants to supply the operating system for the first half of that journey and eventually the second.

For now the company is live with the dual-agent product, fresh capital and a clear claim that B2B’s version of the creator economy has arrived later but will move just as hard. The $1.2 million buys the infrastructure to test whether newsletters, podcasts and LinkedIn voices can become as measurable and bookable as the old media buys they are quietly replacing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Astute and what did they do before?

Vida Stanić (CEO) and Abhishek Manikandan (CTO) co-founded the company in 2025. Stanić led growth at Fluidstack during its rapid climb from a $2 million to a $2 billion valuation; Manikandan is an Oxford graduate, former machine-learning engineer at The Trade Desk, and built a YouTube engineering channel that passed 15 million views.

How much did Astute raise and who invested?

Astute raised an oversubscribed $1.2 million (approximately €1.03 million) pre-seed round. Backers are Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and strategic angel investors.

What do Astute’s two AI agents actually do?

One agent acts as a talent manager for creators, handling administrative work around brand deals. The second acts as a new-media manager for B2B companies: it monitors more than one million creator posts per minute, spots brand and competitor mentions, recommends creators, builds strategies and helps run editorial, podcast, advertising and event partnerships.

Which performance metrics does the platform track?

Astute reports impressions, conversions, brand visibility scores and visibility inside AI-powered search engines, giving marketers a single view of both human-audience reach and machine-discovery impact.