When advertising agencies create ads for clients, they don’t just make one advert, but potentially hundreds of iterations for a ream of platforms, and that can be pretty manually intensive. Creatopy, which automates ad creation using AI, has now raised a $10 million Series A co-led by European VCs 3VC (based out of Austria) and Point Nine (based out of Germany).
The startup — which was developed in Romania but has a U.S. TopCo — now considers more than 5,000 brands and agencies as its clients, which use it to create, customize and automate their adverts and visual content production.
With a welter of web-based and now social media channels, advertising formats are changing constantly under pressures such as A/B testing and the need for personalization. As a result, a number of solutions have arisen, each attempting to be a sort of “canvas on steroids” for advert production. These include Celtra (out of Boston; has raised $25 million) and Bannerflow (out of Stockholm; angel-backed). All these companies specialize in the optimizing and scaling of digital ads.
With millions of businesses now employed in online advertising, including SMEs, managing the creative for these ads has become something of a challenge.
“We’re mostly for top brands and agencies,” CEO Dan Oros told me. “Canva is trying to get into this space now with Canva For Business, but that means that they will really need to completely change their model.”
He says Creatopy might have an edge, with its focus on agencies: “When you think about ad creation, there are a few pillars. One is creating the ad. The second — extremely important — is the scaling, the personalization, the automation at scale. How do you go from one asset to thousands of different variations and sizes at once? Then there’s the serving part, how you put those ads into like Facebook, Google Display, other publishers and so forth, right?”
His view is that Canva will have a problem because of its focus on the long tail of design. “Canva is very focused on the long tail, on the creation piece. That’s it. We are very focused on the scaling part, on the automation and the serving part.”
Oros recently took over as CEO from founders Daniel Demian (who remains VP of product) and founding designer Gery Meleg (still on board as VP of design), and Gabriel Ciordas (a board member).
Oros is an experienced operator. Before joining he was at Google and YouTube for six years, running marketing projects for Central and Eastern Europe. Before that he was at BlaBlaCar, expanding the company in Eastern Europe, Hungary, Croatia and Romania.
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