Melbourne-founded adtech startup Cuttable has raised $20 million in Series A funding and relaunched its platform with new AI-based features to better inform brand’s digital advertising decisions.
The funding round, led by Airtree Ventures, also saw Square Peg, which led Cuttable’s seed round, return for the Series A alongside existing investors Rampersand and Glitch Capital.
Cuttable’s product turns brands’ product photo and video assets into Meta and TikTok ads with the help of AI.
This latest product update, facilitated by the $20 million raise, allows AI to make more informed decisions about which ads to create next and how to create them for better performance.
It draws on performance from Meta and TikTok, catalogue and stock from Shopify, and data from tools such as Klaviyo, ProfitPeak, Triple Whale, North Beam and Motion. For example, if a brand is on Shopify, a product about to sell out gets a different ad to one the business needs to move.
These ads then publish directly to Meta or TikTok, with the results fed back in to the system for the next round of iterations.
“Everyone has taught AI to make ads. Almost nobody has taught the ads to learn,” said CEO and co-founder Sam Kroonenburg, who also founded A Cloud Guru and sold it in 2021 for more than US$2 billion.
“Every ad a brand runs tells it something about its customers, but most teams switch it off and start the next one from scratch. We hold onto what each ad learned and put it straight into the next. It’s what we set out to build from day one, and I’m incredibly proud of the team for getting us here. Early customer feedback has been amazing.”
Cuttable works with more than 440 ecommerce brands across the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Europe, including lululemon, Cotton On, July, Kathmandu and Conserving Beauty.
Cuttable said brands that it works with average a 4.4 times return on ad spend after moving to its platform with campaigns live in a day instead of two to three weeks.
Airtree Ventures partner James Cameron, whose firm also backed A Cloud Guru, said: “Since we backed Cuttable’s seed round, their growth has been much faster than our (already very high) expectations. The world of ad creative is being turned on its head by AI, and we’re excited to lead this round as Cuttable becomes the leading system that performance marketers reach for to make content work harder.”
Cuttable launched in the US last year ahead of Black Friday and embarked on what it called the “the biggest giveaway in advertising history” – offering 3.1 billion free video ads to US ecommerce brands during the shopping bonanza.
Cuttable’s investors also include Brand Fund by Previously Unavailable, the venture studio behind martech companies Ideally and Tracksuit, which has supported the company since seed. The launch lands five weeks before Black Friday on 27 November, the busiest stretch of the year for ecommerce advertising.
