Country for PR: United Kingdom
Contributor: PR Newswire Europe
Tuesday, May 18 2021 - 17:08
AsiaNet
MarTech Startup Affable.ai Raises USD 2M to Boost the Adoption of its Influencer Marketing Platform
BENGALURU, India and SINGAPORE May 18, 2021 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --

- Investors: Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, SGInnovate


    Singapore-based Martech startup, Affable.ai (http://affable.ai/) has raised 
USD Two Million from Prime Venture Partners (https://primevp.in/), Decacorn 
Capital & SGInnovate. Affable's AI-driven, Self-service SaaS platform helps 
brands and agencies run high impact influencer marketing campaigns. Affable 
brings transparency and analytics to influencer marketing and is being 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. With the 
fresh funding, Affable plans to expand into international markets such as the 
U.S.

    Affable was founded by Nisarg Shah (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisarg259/) 
and Swayam Narain (https://www.linkedin.com/in/swayam-narain/) in 2017 as part 
of the Entrepreneur First cohort. The end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform 
allows brands and agencies to streamline their influencer strategies throughout 
the planning, discovery, activation, and reporting phases. 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. 

    A global rise in digital consumption continues to propel influencer 
marketing campaigns among brands across all sectors. Being a mobile-first 
region along with its youthful demography and growing popularity of social 
platforms, Southeast Asia has become an ideal ground for influencer marketing 
to flourish and the market is estimated to reach $2.59 billion by 2024 ( 
https://rthree.com/insights/influencer-marketing-in-southeast-asia/). Globally, 
the industry is very bullish and is pegged to reach $15 billion by next year. A 
primary reason for this growth is largely attributed to the large numbers of 
internet users and majority of them using smartphones. Furthermore, the 
COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the influencer marketing wave across the world. 
Cooped up at home, users are spending more time on social networking, gaming, 
and watching OTT content. The huge amounts of time spent online has prompted 
brands to work more with social media influencers on platforms such as YouTube, 
Facebook, and Instagram to connect with their consumers. Subsequently, 
Micro-influencers/ Micro-celebrities can drive a much higher reach at a much 
lower cost. 

    However, with up to 6X ROI on micro-influencer marketing budgets, brands 
are still struggling to find relevant influencers and measure their 
effectiveness. Traditionally, the influencer marketing process involves finding 
influencers, vetting audience quality, tracking & measuring results manually. 
Affable has not only made this process automated but also intelligent by 
building proprietary algorithms around its data infrastructure where it uses 
advanced ML and image processing models for an 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. Affable indexes all the social media users and identifies 
potential influencers that a brand could work with. Using Affable, marketers 
can find influencers, manage them campaign-wise, and measure post-campaign 
analytics such as engagement from in-target audience, influencer success(as a 
group and individually), measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign, as 
well as measure clicks and sales. 

    Including the current funding round, Affable has raised USD 2.8M 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. 

    Supporting Quotes

    Nisarg Shah, CEO and Co-founder, Affable.ai

    "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." 

    Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners

    "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 3-5 years. We believe that Influencer marketing will become a 
mainstream marketing channel for brands with a significant budget allocation. 
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. We are excited by the demand and the potential 
for this service and are delighted to back founders who are extremely 
passionate and have deep expertise in this field." 

    Debneel Mukherjee, Managing Partner, Decacorn Capital

    "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 monetize the hyper social behavioral 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 6-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."

    About Affable

    Affable is an end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform used by leading 
global brands to find, manage, monitor and measure influencers seamlessly. The 
platform allows brands to discover, engage and measure social media 
influencers. Affable is developing Artificial Intelligence algorithms that 
profiles influencers and their audience across social media channels such as 
Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc. Affable was founded by Nisarg Shah 
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisarg259/) and Swayam Narain 
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/swayam-narain/) in 2017 as part of the 
Entrepreneur First cohort. For further information, please visit: 
https://www.affable.ai/.

    Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1512485/Affable_Team.jpg  
    
    Photo: 
    https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1512487/influencer_marketing_growth.jpg  
    Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1512486/Affable_Logo.jpg 

    Source : Affable.ai
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