Building a two-sided network that OpenAI cannot replicate, this AI-native marketing platform is seeing explosive growth
Cover Source | Provided by the enterprise
Behind the grand narrative of brand globalization, few people notice that the global advertising budget is nearly $2 trillion, and influencer marketing has become a hidden track worth tens of billions of dollars.
Even fewer people know that this track is being quietly rewritten by a startup with an AI-native platform.
The extremely decentralized overseas influencer marketing market unexpectedly still relies on the "primitive model", including manually sending emails, negotiating prices, and urging for manuscripts - with extremely low efficiency but making money quietly. Based on the legal culture of contract spirit and the supremacy of individual rights, overseas influencers highly value creative independence, making it difficult to form an MCN culture. This also leads to a high dependence on manual labor in global business transactions, and has long been trapped in the dilemma of high costs and low efficiency.
36Kr noticed that an AI Native enterprise named AhaCreator is trying to reconstruct this process with an AI-native bilateral platform and build an insurmountable moat of data and trust for general large models in the process.
According to the latest information obtained by 36Kr, AhaCreator recently officially announced the completion of the Pre-A round and Pre-A+ round of financing, with a cumulative financing amount of over $10 million. Among them, Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group and First Light Capital were introduced in the Pre-A round, and the old shareholders Jinqiu Fund and GSR Ventures continued to follow up; BlueFocus, a strategic investor, was introduced in the Pre-A+ round.
So far, AhaCreator has become one of the companies with the leading financing scale in the global AI Native influencer marketing track. It is worth mentioning that AhaCreator is also the first project of Jinqiu Fund's Seed Plan and has received multiple rounds of investment from Jinqiu Fund. Zhu Xiaohu of GSR Ventures also continues to be optimistic and has increased his investment in multiple rounds.
During the same period, AhaCreator released its 3.0 version product, comprehensively upgrading core modules such as AI matching, risk screening, full-process execution, and content review. Official data shows that more than 300 enterprises have currently selected AhaCreator as the core execution layer for influencer marketing. The platform has over 100,000 overseas influencers registered, making it one of the largest AI-native influencer marketing networks in the world, covering mainstream platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn, as well as more than 140 countries and regions.
Image source: Provided by AhaCreator
More importantly, according to 36Kr, AhaCreator's user group includes several large Internet companies and globally well-known brands, and these users explicitly require the cooperation information to be kept confidential - because AhaCreator has become their secret to marketing growth, and competitors still don't know that their opponents are using this platform.
In this trend of AI application, what makes AhaCreator, which is making great strides in commercialization, different?
The "scattered-to-scattered" dilemma in the trillion-dollar market is pried open by AI-driven orders
The global influencer marketing market has reached a scale of tens of billions of dollars and is still growing at a high speed. Goldman Sachs predicts that the entire creator economy market will reach $480 billion by 2027. However, the extreme dispersion on the supply side has kept influencer marketing in a labor-intensive state for a long time.
"This is very similar to the rental market. You don't know who to find, and even if you find someone, you're not at ease." Kay Feng, the founder and CEO of AhaCreator, told 36Kr. There are two traditional solutions: one is for brands to build their own in-house teams. For example, ByteDance built a BD team of hundreds of people for the overseas launch of CapCut in the early days; the other is to cooperate with small and medium-sized agencies. However, both face the same bottleneck - the ceiling of human efficiency is extremely low, and the larger the scale, the higher the management cost, making it difficult to achieve large-scale profitability.
AhaCreator's entry point is full-process AI automation: from influencer matching, email connection, price negotiation, manuscript urging, content review to data collection, all are handled by AI Agents. But this is just the starting point.
The real difficulty lies in the fact that this is a typical "scattered-to-scattered" bilateral platform - on one side are scattered global brands, and on the other side are even more scattered overseas influencers. Without merchants, influencers won't come; without influencers, merchants won't join. Just like in the early days of the Internet, traditional bilateral platforms often need to burn money for subsidies to complete the cold start stage.
But AhaCreator perfectly solved the dilemma with a strategy of "finding people with orders". It took advantage of an industry habit, that is, overseas influencers are used to receiving business orders through email. In the early days, the platform legally obtained the emails that influencers voluntarily made public for receiving cooperation messages, and then the AI actively contacted influencers with real brand orders - "When influencers take this order, they will join the platform by the way." This way of "finding people with orders" allowed the platform to complete the accumulation of the first batch of supply with almost no subsidy budget.
As of now, the platform has over 100,000 overseas influencers registered, quickly becoming one of the largest AI-native influencer marketing networks in the world.
Image source: Provided by AhaCreator
This mechanism not only solves the cold start problem but also naturally forms a rolling bilateral flywheel: when brand owners see real and active influencers on the platform, they are more willing to post orders; when influencers see real business orders on the platform, they are more willing to join and stay. Every time a transaction is completed, the value of the platform for both parties increases.
This year, more strategic partners have supported the platform, and the bilateral flywheel is spinning stronger: AhaCreator has become the first overseas influencer marketing AI Agent partner of Feishu and has reached strategic cooperation with BlueFocus and Minglue Technology to jointly explore a new global overseas expansion pattern.
It is worth mentioning that Kay Feng, the founder of AhaCreator, is a post-2000 serial entrepreneur. Since 2021, she has been deeply involved in the growth of overseas PLG products. After the explosion of ChatGPT in early 2023, she was in charge of the overseas growth of Dora AI. In just three months, she promoted the product to grow from 0 to 500,000 users, surpassing Pika Labs and Google Bard, and won the Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards for the best AI product of the year. She is also one of the earliest growth leaders in the Chinese SaaS and AI circles to systematically practice global influencer marketing.
Among the founding team, Wels Wang, the co-founder and COO, has investment experience and has served as an EIR at IDG and a partner at Yuanyi Capital. Francis Yang, the CPO, was once the core product manager of TikTok Creator Marketplace and was deeply involved in the construction of the world's leading official influencer marketing platform. The Head of CS and Head of Sales are from CreatorIQ and Traackr respectively, with experience in customer growth and commercialization systems of the world's leading influencer marketing SaaS. The R & D team includes engineers who were admitted to Tsinghua University through competitions, former Dora AI engineers, and senior AI engineers from companies such as ByteDance, Liftoff, Grab, and Meituan.
This makes AhaCreator a unique example in the industry. It understands both global influencer marketing and AI algorithms, and has become one of the world's earliest influencer marketing platforms to achieve 100% end-to-end AI.
When the transaction closed-loop builds a data flywheel
After the bilateral network is launched, the real moat comes from the continuous precipitation of transaction data. On the basis of strict compliance, AhaCreator has access to the complete closed-loop data of each order: brand budget, actual transaction price of influencers, content delivery quality, on-time performance rate, and mutual evaluations. These exclusive data cannot be retrieved through public channels and cannot be easily replicated by large model APIs.
"Large models can analyze the public content style of influencers, but they don't know the real bottom price of this influencer when facing different brands, nor do they know if he submitted the manuscript on time last time." Kay Feng said. These closed-loop data are fed back into the matching algorithm, pricing recommendation model, and risk screening model, forming a continuously self-reinforcing data flywheel.
In terms of human efficiency, an operator can complete more than 500 influencer collaborations per month with the help of AI, while in the traditional model, each person can only complete about 50 per month. This means that with the same human input, AhaCreator can support more than 10 times the business scale, and there is still room for further improvement in efficiency as the data accumulates.
Image source: Provided by AhaCreator
At the product level, AhaCreator has always maintained a fast pace of iterative upgrades. In the recently released 3.0 version:
AI matching does not rely on simple label screening. Instead, it analyzes the video style, audio, copywriting, and comment section interactions of influencers through a multi-modal model, understanding the real tone of influencers like a senior expert. Users only need to describe their needs in natural language (for example, "Find a beauty blogger in Los Angeles with a y2k style"), and the AI can automatically generate the definition of the target group and output a selected list with matching scores.
The AI risk screening module automatically identifies problems such as fake followers and comments, controversial historical remarks, unstable content picture quality, and inconsistent fan profiles and data before cooperation.
In the AI manuscript review process, 1,000 manuscripts can be reviewed within a few minutes, and judgments and optimization suggestions are given from multiple dimensions such as core information coverage, content structure, brand compliance, and global localization.
In terms of funds and performance, the platform provides standardized contracts (verified by local legal counsel), and the funds are fully entrusted by the platform. If the influencer fails to deliver on time and in full, the platform will automatically refund the full amount. Cross-border payments in more than 140 countries are handled uniformly by the platform.
"No matter how powerful large models are, it's difficult for them to solve the problem of trust," Kay Feng told 36Kr. "Once influencers establish a deep trust foundation with our platform, the flywheel will spin faster, and the order acceptance rate will be even higher."
A battlefield that OpenAI and others can hardly reach: bilateral network and data moat
In AhaCreator's narrative, the most critical dividing line is not the level of AI capabilities, but "whether it has a bilateral network and the complexity of the physical world." Kay Feng also believes that this is a battlefield that large models such as Claude Code and GPT cannot enter.
36Kr learned that AhaCreator has established a solid bilateral network: on one side are more than 100,000 registered influencers, and on the other side is a diverse lineup of representative users - there are more than 300 paying enterprise users, distributed in tracks such as AI, e-commerce, consumer goods, and games. There are not only star AI tools such as SeaArt, Hakko AI, and ONLYOFFICE but also well-known brands such as WonderBiotics and Sportneer.
What's more noteworthy is that among AhaCreator's customer list, there are several large Internet companies and globally well-known brands. However, most of them require confidentiality - perhaps AhaCreator has become one of their "secret weapons" for quiet growth in the overseas market.
On the influencer side of AhaCreator 3.0, influencers can receive brand invitations and modification suggestions more promptly through the app, push notifications, and the new workbench. They can view on the same page which tasks are pending, the progress of the project, and the expected income, which also makes the interaction between influencers and brands smoother. As the bilateral experience continues to iterate, overseas influencers are spreading the word, and even the overseas media Forbes has noticed and reported on AhaCreator's rapid rise in the influencer circle.
When we look at the entire AI era, in contrast, in any application track, asset-light unilateral AI tools are being rapidly dissolved by large models. From the perspective of large models, there will always be a perfect model more powerful than the human brain in the future, creating better AI tools needed in various fields, but such tools have no real barriers.
AhaCreator's bilateral platform model is completely different. It naturally has a network effect. More brands bring more orders, more orders attract more influencers, and more influencers attract more brands. Even if latecomers in the track have stronger models, they cannot replicate the already operating bilateral network overnight. Data, stickiness, and trust will become AhaCreator's most solid moat.
Image source: Provided by AhaCreator
In addition, influencer marketing also involves a lot of dirty and tiring work related to performance and cross-border compliance. "In the past, social media platforms also tried to build their own influencer markets, but ultimately they all chose to hand it over to service providers because they thought these dirty and tiring jobs were too troublesome," Kay Feng told 36Kr. "Large model manufacturers face the same choice. For a market worth tens of billions of dollars, is it worth investing so many resources? From a strategic priority perspective, they may not choose to do so."
From the perspective of the competitive landscape, the AI + influencer marketing track where AhaCreator is located is still a blue ocean, but AhaCreator has become the fastest-growing dark horse. Influencer Marketing Hub, the world's most authoritative influencer marketing research platform, selected AhaCreator as the "Best Influencer Marketing AI Agent in 2026". Only six platforms in the world were selected, and AhaCreator is the only AI Agent that can "execute the entire process autonomously" and the only AI-native company.
With a large enough market space and strong AI-native product capabilities, AhaCreator has a particularly outstanding commercial performance - it has achieved efficient GTM (Go-To-Market) growth directly in the mainstream European and American markets.
36Kr learned that AhaCreator's revenue has increased dozens of times from the first quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026. More importantly, relying on the industry-leading product maturity, more than half of the enterprise users can independently complete the business closed-loop of "first spontaneous payment + continuous repurchase" without sales guidance, which also means that as a bilateral platform, AhaCreator does not need to burn money to gain market share - it is a fast-growing platform that doesn't burn money.
From the perspective of the competitive landscape, the AI + influencer marketing track where AhaCreator is located is still a blue ocean globally. As more enterprise users gradually switch to the new AI-native workflow model, the platform is achieving a large-scale leap with high value, running out a high-explosion and highly certain growth curve in the wave of AI globalization.
There is never a shortage of stories in the multi-billion-dollar track. What is truly scarce is the ability to weave scattered individuals, fragmented needs, and complex performance into a trustworthy and scalable network.
When AI Native starts to reconstruct the execution layer of marketing, the way of global business connection may be redefined.