The Core Bet: B2B Marketing Has a New Channel Problem
Billions of dollars in B2B marketing budgets still flow into Google ads, PR agencies, and SEO programs built for a world where buyers found products through search. That world is changing fast — and Astute is building the infrastructure to replace it.
The company, founded by Vida Stanić and Abhishek Manikandan, launched its platform today alongside an oversubscribed $1.2 million pre-seed round. Investors include Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, with strategic angels also participating.
"For years, B2B marketing relied on ads, PR and SEO. But audiences have moved to new media channels — newsletters, podcasts, LinkedIn, X. In direct-to-consumer space, that shift turned influencer marketing into one of the biggest line items in the budget. B2B is next." — Vida Stanić, Founder & CEO, Astute
Two AI Agents, Two Sides of the Market
Astute's approach centers on two AI agents: one that manages the administrative side of brand partnerships on behalf of creators, and one that monitors creator content, identifies relevant conversations, develops creator strategies, secures partnerships, and tracks results for B2B companies.
The company-side agent monitors more than one million creator posts per minute, identifies mentions of a company and its competitors, recommends creators and partnerships, and measures impressions, conversions, brand score, and visibility in AI search engines.
The types of partnerships the platform facilitates span a wide range:
- Editorial placements
- Podcast appearances and interviews
- Sponsored newsletter slots
- Advertising and event collaborations
This dual-sided model is notable. Rather than purely serving B2B buyers trying to find creators, Astute also handles the administration burden on the creator side — making it structurally similar to a marketplace play, where both supply and demand need to be unlocked simultaneously.
Why Discovery Is Broken for B2B
B2B companies currently struggle to identify, access, and manage partnerships with relevant newsletter, podcast, and social media creators — and the process is fragmented, manual, and time-consuming.
Stanić experienced this friction directly while working in growth roles before founding Astute. The problem isn't just finding a relevant creator; it's everything that comes after — establishing contact, negotiating terms, coordinating content, and then actually measuring whether any of it worked.
That last piece matters more than ever right now. As AI-powered discovery reshapes how buyers find products — through AI search, recommendation engines, and conversational interfaces — brand visibility in AI-generated responses is emerging as a new success metric alongside traditional impressions and conversions. Astute's platform tracks both.
The Bigger Strategic Picture
The positioning here goes beyond influencer marketing tooling. Astute is making an argument that distribution is becoming the moat — that as AI lowers the barrier to building software products and saturates technology markets with competitors, the companies that win will be those with the strongest relationships with trusted independent voices.
That logic has a direct parallel in consumer markets, where creator marketing has already become a multi-billion-dollar industry. The B2B version of that shift is arguably still early, which makes the timing of Astute's launch interesting.
It's also worth noting that creator content itself may feed AI discovery engines. As AI agents increasingly influence product recommendations and search results, content produced by independent newsletters, podcasters, and social creators — rather than brand-owned pages — may carry more weight in those systems. Astute is betting that the companies who invest in those relationships now will be better positioned when AI-mediated discovery matures.
What's Next
The company's near-term focus is on automating the full creator partnership lifecycle. Longer term, Astute plans to expand into broader brand-building tools — helping B2B companies not just reach existing audiences through creators, but develop their own audiences and establish category credibility over time.
For startup founders and B2B marketers already experimenting with newsletter sponsorships or podcast outreach, Astute's platform represents a potential step-change from manual prospecting and spreadsheet-tracked campaigns to a structured, data-driven workflow — with performance measurement built in from day one.
