AdScout has signed its first customers in the United States at a moment when the Bulgarian startup is outgrowing the category where it began. The company entered the market through creator commerce. Today, it is building around a broader ambition: agentic commerce.
Every major shift in commerce has rewritten the mechanics of trust. Search engines organized the web, social media humanized recommendations, and AI is now reorganizing the information that sits between a product and the decision to buy it.
That is where AdScout finds itself today. The Bulgarian company is now preparing for broader international expansion at a moment when several developments are reinforcing one another.
Over the past few months, AdScout has brought former Google Ads team lead Lachezar Atanasov as AI Head of Product. The company also just signed a new customer - Ozone.bg, expanding its portfolio with one of Bulgaria's largest online retailers.
Another recent milestone is securing a new angel investment that will accelerate the development of its agentic commerce roadmap. The funding will support the platform as the company prepares to expand into additional international markets, building the infrastructure it believes will underpin a new generation of AI-driven commerce. This investment is taking AdScout further toward closing a new investment round, to accelerate scaling.
AdScout entered the market through creator commerce, helping brands integrate creator-generated product reviews and video content directly into e-commerce experiences while allowing creators to monetize through affiliate partnerships. The proposition for the brands was about bringing themselves closer to trust at a time when the buying decision is being made. For creators, it meant a clearer route from influence to revenue, without having to manage the commercial and administrative burden that often comes with affiliate partnerships.
What Miroslav Stoyanov and his team kept encountering, however, was that brands needed something content alone could not provide: the infrastructure that made creator commerce workable at scale.
Every recommendation comes with a surprising amount of work behind it: finding creators, managing campaigns, tracking affiliate links, handling payments, contracts, and reporting. For most brands, none of it happens in the same place.
Connecting the missing infrastructure of creator commerce
That realization reshaped the company's ambition. AdScout began looking beyond creator campaigns to the infrastructure surrounding them, where every interaction generated another piece of the purchasing journey. As the number of campaigns grew, so did the value of the information they produced.
"Commerce has always rewarded the companies that reduce friction. Search reduced the friction of finding products. Social media reduced the friction of discovering them through people you trust. We think AI reduces a different kind of friction: understanding which information is worth trusting before you make a decision." says Miroslav Stoyanov, CEO of AdScout.
That is the logic behind AdScout's move toward agentic commerce. At a time when almost every company claims to be AI-powered, AdScout is focused on a more practical question: what does AI make better for the people using it?
The answer they came up with is helping people navigate the growing volume of information surrounding products, connecting reviews, recommendations, creator experiences, and purchasing data into something useful at the moment a decision needs to be made.
It seems we have reached the end of the product specifications era. For years, commerce treated information as something that sits next to the product, but somewhere along the way it became a natural part of the product itself. Reviews, customer feedback and behavioral cues now all shape how products are understood, compared, and trusted before a transaction takes place. A specification sheet can tell you what a product does, but you’re still more likely to buy it once you understand why another person chose it.
Solving the “Trust Tax” at scale
It is perhaps no coincidence that AdScout's first US customer arrives now. As AI becomes an active participant in the buying journey, retailers are discovering that the “Trust Tax” has deepened. Trust now emerges from the relationship between reviews, creator experiences, customer feedback, and every interaction surrounding a product, making it considerably harder to understand, measure, and operationalize than when purchasing decisions were shaped by a handful of touchpoints.
AdScout's ambition is to bring that complexity one step closer to a working model. The transition the company is building around is already underway, as purchasing decisions become shaped by an expanding network of people, platforms, and AI systems.
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