MarTech Startup Affable.ai Raises USD 2 Million to Boost the Adoption of its Influencer Marketing Platform

By AIT News Desk On May 18, 2021

Singapore-based Martech startup, Affable.ai has raised USD Two Million from Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital & SGInnovate. Affable’s AI-driven, Self-service SaaS platform helps brands and agencies run high impact influencer marketing campaigns. Affable brings transparency and analytics to influencer marketing and is being used by over 45 top brands and agencies including Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, Dentsu, and We Communications. The company tracks more than Three Million Influencers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. With the fresh funding, Affable plans to expand into international markets such as the U.S.

Affable was founded by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain in 2017 as part of the Entrepreneur First cohort. The end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform allows brands and agencies to streamline their influencer strategies throughout the planning, discovery, activation, and reporting phases. Affable uses advanced machine learning and big data analytics to help brands find influencers, manage and measure campaign performance. With the influencer marketing process being extremely manual, time-consuming and completely based on guesswork, Affable provides brands with data-driven insights and analytics to help streamline their micro-influencer marketing process.

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A global rise in digital consumption continues to propel influencer marketing campaigns among brands across all sectors. Being a mobile-first region along with its youthful demography and growing popularity of social platforms, Southeast Asia has become an ideal ground for influencer marketing to flourish and the market is estimated to reach $2.59 billion by 2024. Globally, the industry is very bullish and is pegged to reach $15 billion by next year. A primary reason for this growth is largely attributed to the large numbers of internet users and majority of them using smartphones. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the influencer marketing wave across the world. Cooped up at home, users are spending more time on social networking, gaming, and watching OTT content. The huge amounts of time spent online has prompted brands to work more with social media influencers on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to connect with their consumers. Subsequently, Micro-influencers/ Micro-celebrities can drive a much higher reach at a much lower cost.

However, with up to 6X ROI on micro-influencer marketing budgets, brands are still struggling to find relevant influencers and measure their effectiveness. Traditionally, the influencer marketing process involves finding influencers, vetting audience quality, tracking & measuring results manually. Affable has not only made this process automated but also intelligent by building proprietary algorithms around its data infrastructure where it uses advanced ML and image processing models for an accurate influencer-brand mapping and measuring campaign ROIs. The platform detects fake followers, discovers follower interests and classifies social media users based on brands, fan pages etc. Affable indexes all the social media users and identifies potential influencers that a brand could work with. Using Affable, marketers can find influencers, manage them campaign-wise, and measure post-campaign analytics such as engagement from in-target audience, influencer success(as a group and individually), measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign, as well as measure clicks and sales.

Including the current funding round, Affable has raised USD 2.8M from Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, SGInnovate, Entrepreneur First and strategic angel investors. Headquartered in Singapore, the startup has 20 employees working remotely across different geographies.

Supporting Quotes

Nisarg Shah, CEO and Co-founder, Affable.ai

“We see a huge opportunity in working with brands to enable the much needed, data-driven influencer marketing campaigns. The industry-leading brands and agencies we work with reinforce our belief in the need for analytics to streamline the micro-influencer marketing process. Prime brings a depth of experience in scaling global SaaS companies, operational expertise, as well as a strong network that we can leverage during our growth phase and we are very excited to partner with them. At the same time, participation from our existing investors is a great endorsement for us.”

Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners

“Data-driven analytics is the need of the hour in the influencer marketing ecosystem which is a new and upcoming marketing channel and has picked up steam in the last 3-5 years. We believe that Influencer marketing will become a mainstream marketing channel for brands with a significant budget allocation. Affable’s tech differentiation will transform the way brands and agencies interact with micro-influencers and celebrities, ensuring they get maximum RoI from their marketing campaigns. We are excited by the demand and the potential for this service and are delighted to back founders who are extremely passionate and have deep expertise in this field.”

Debneel Mukherjee, Managing Partner, Decacorn Capital

“As the lead investor in Affable’s seed round, Decacorn believes that ‘prime-time’ has arrived in the AI driven influencer marketing space to effectively monetize the hyper social behavioral changes in the post millennials. We are glad to have worked closely with the Affable team over these past two years in scaling their business from a product-market fit stage to a rapidly growing 6-digit MRR as on date. In order to help Affable scale beyond Asia into the holy grail of the USA we have ponied up in Affable to the fullest extent.”