Clouted secures $7 million seed funding to automate short-form video marketing
Led by Slow Ventures, the round supports Clouted’s mission to replace guesswork in viral marketing with continuous AI testing and a vast network of independent editors.
Clouted, a startup developing AI-driven infrastructure for short video clipping and distribution, has closed a $7 million seed funding round. The investment was led by Slow Ventures, with additional participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, and Peak XV’s Surge. The capital will support the company’s efforts to automate the extraction and dissemination of short video content, a sector that has gained traction as brands seek cost-effective marketing channels.
The platform utilises a network of more than 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, typically extracting 30 to 90-second segments from longer-form content such as podcasts or films. While many brands and agencies outsource this clipping process to independent workers, managing the logistics and determining optimal distribution strategies presents significant operational challenges. Clouted aims to resolve these inefficiencies by combining human editing capacity with artificial intelligence to identify the most effective social media platforms and target audiences for each clip.
Unlike tools that prioritise volume, Clouted’s system employs a continuous testing loop to evaluate different formats and distribution strategies. Co-founder and CEO Justin Banusing described the approach as analogous to penetration testing in cybersecurity, where the system probes various approaches to determine what triggers viral performance. The data accumulated from these tests allows subsequent campaigns to become more targeted and efficient.
Banusing, a former DJ, initially applied the technology to promote &Friends, a Manila-based electronic dance music festival. The strategy helped the event grow to attract over 20,000 attendees. According to Banusing, the platform’s learning capabilities ensure that each campaign informs the next, identifying which formats win, which audiences convert, and which distribution channels compound over time.
The automated clipping market includes direct competitors such as Overlap AI. However, Banusing identifies broader marketing infrastructure providers as the ultimate competitive landscape, specifically citing CreatorIQ and Hightouch. Hightouch recently surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, indicating the scale of the enterprise marketing technology space Clouted intends to serve. The startup emerged from the a16z Speedrun accelerator programme in 2024 prior to this latest funding announcement.
