[Funding alert] Affable AI raises $2M led by Prime VP, Decacorn Capital, SGInnovate

Affable.ai, the Singapore-based martech startup, has raised $2 million from Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, and SGInnovate. With the fresh funding, Affable plans to expand into international markets such as the US.

The startup helps brands and agencies run high impact influencer marketing campaigns with its AI-driven self-service SaaS platform. It is 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.

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Including the current funding round, Affable has raised $2.8 million 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. 

Nisarg Shah, CEO and Co-founder, Affable.ai said, “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,” he added. 

Founded in 2017 by Nisarg and Swayam Narain, Affable was a part of the Entrepreneur First cohort. The startup helps brands and agencies streamline their influencer strategies throughout the planning, discovery, activation, and reporting phases.

Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners said, “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 three to five years. We believe that influencer marketing will become a mainstream marketing channel for brands with a significant budget allocation.

He explained, 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.  

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. 

The statement shared by Prime Venture Parters added that as Southeast Asia is a mobile-first region with its youthful demography and growing popularity of social platforms, it has become an ideal ground for influencer marketing to flourish, and the market is estimated to reach $2.59 billion by 2024.

It stated, traditionally, the influencer marketing process involves finding influencers, vetting audience quality, tracking and measuring results manually. Affable has made this process automated and has also intelligent by building proprietary algorithms around its data infrastructure. It also uses advanced ML and image processing models for 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. It indexes all the social media users and identifies potential influencers that a brand could work with.

Debneel Mukherjee, Managing Partner, Decacorn Capital said, "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 monetise the hyper social behavioural 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 six-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."