Affable to boost influencer marketing platform after raising $2m

Affable.ai, a Singapore-based marketing technology (martech) startup, seeks to boost the adoption of its influencer marketing platform after raising $2 million in its latest funding round

Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, and SGInnovate participated in the funding round that further fuels the company’s plan to expand into international markets such as the US.

Affable was founded in 2017 by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain as part of the Entrepreneur First cohort. The platform allows brands and agencies to streamline their influencer strategies through 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,” the company said in a statement.

The startup said its platform, which tracks more than 3 million influencers, is being used by over 45 top brands and agencies, including Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, Dentsu, and We Communications.

“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,” said Shah, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

The funding round comes as the influencer marketing market in Southeast Asia is estimated to reach $2.59 billion by 2024. 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, with majority of them using smartphones. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the influencer marketing wave across the world.

“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,” according to Shripati Acharya, managing partner at Prime Venture Partners, one of the investors in the funding round.

“We believe that Influencer marketing will become a mainstream marketing channel for brands with a significant budget allocation,” he added.