Nectar launched an AI agent to automate creator discovery; plus, Britain’s Fractile gets a leg up in the race for AI chips

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0:50So you can focus on other important things, like savoring that last bit of pumpkin pie. From early startups to Fortune 500 companies, thousands are turning to Framer to build a website they'll love. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. Nectar is an AI-powered operating system for marketing, and the company is launching a new AI agent designed to take a lot of the manual work out of influencer marketing, from finding the right creators to contacting them, managing partnerships, and tracking results.

1:39Founded by sisters Misbah and Farah Urezi, both former Meta employees, Nectar came out of stealth last year and uses AI agents to help brands manage social media, customer conversations, content moderation, creator partnerships, and competitor research. Announced on Thursday, its new Creator Agent can search for creators, check their content and brand partnerships, send personalized messages, coordinate collaborations, and monitor how campaigns perform. Instead of having marketing teams spend weeks scrolling through social media, building spreadsheets, and sending individual DMs, Nectar wants its agents to handle much of that work automatically.

2:26Nectar joins other companies introducing agentic AI assistance designed to automate influencer outreach, including Aspire and Grin. The launch also comes as more brands turn to creators to reach customers. U.S. spending on creator advertising is expected to reach$44 billion this year. That's according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. As companies work with hundreds or even thousands of creators, keeping track of relationships and measuring results can get pretty difficult. Nectar says its creator agent searches more than 300 million creator profiles to find potential partners, including smaller creators who may not yet have a large following but are gaining traction.

3:09The system analyzes videos to understand what creators post about, how their content fits a brand, and whether their previous partnerships are appropriate. It also checks brand safety by reviewing content in context rather than simply searching for specific keywords. Nectar then creates ranked lists of recommendations and adds new matches as creators become more popular. Once it finds a potential match, the agent can draft and send messages in a brand's voice, create custom landing pages to collect creator information, and help manage contracts, product gifting, and shipping details. It also remembers previous conversations and interactions, so brands can keep track of relationships without relying on spreadsheets.

3:55Another feature looks for personal milestones in creators' lives, such as an engagement, a new baby or completing a marathon, say. The agent can then suggest a personalized message or gift, helping brands build relationships that feel less like one-off advertising deals. Creator Agent is available globally, and it covers Instagram creators and TikTokers. The company plans to make the agent available through its Model Context Protocol, or MCP, allowing teams to use it through AI assistants such as Claude, ChetGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, as well as their own custom-built agents. This past May, Nectar raised a$30 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund, which is a joint initiative launched with Anthropic.

4:48Fractal is a British startup developing AI chips, and the company has raised a$720 million Series C, backed by Britain's sovereign AI fund, with hopes of ensuring the UK has a greater stake in the hardware that will underpin its future economy. Now, this makes Fractal one of the top-funded startup players in the race for purpose-built AI chips. Such chips are one of several avenues being explored to reduce the cost of inference, aka using increasingly demanding AI models in production. However, Fractal seeks to go beyond hardware with a full-stack approach that also includes a machine learning compiler to maximize the speed at which LLMs will get executed on its chips.

5:35As a result, the company frames itself as a frontier AI company, and its latest round, led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Redpoint was priced accordingly. According to the British government, the valuation was over 5 billion pounds, a figure reported by the Financial Times and a Reuters source. Still, Fractal's main differentiator will arguably be its hardware design. After a pivot, its approach now revolves on DRAM, the most common type of RAM, but stacked on top of each chip in such a way that it is hoping will bypass the usual trade-off between memory and capacity.

6:18This trade-off has become more problematic with the rise of agentic AI as companies seek to perform longer chains of tasks with large models without compromising on speed. So, as compute struggles to keep up, hopes are high for AI chips despite their limited availability to date. In a LinkedIn post, Fractal CEO Walter Goodwin wrote that there is still a lot of work ahead for the company, and the next funding will enable the startup to ship its first chips and systems next year. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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