👯 Founder(s): Vida Stanić, Founder & CEO and Abhishek Manikandan, Founder & CTO

📅 Founding year: 2025

🏭 Industry: B2B marketing / creator economy

💥 Problem: B2B companies struggle to identify, access, and manage partnerships with relevant newsletter, podcast, and social media creators. The process is fragmented, manual, and time-consuming.

📣 Solution: Astute uses two AI agents to automate creator partnerships for B2B companies. One manages partnership administration for creators, while the other monitors creator content, identifies relevant conversations, develops creator strategies, secures partnerships and tracks results.

👥 Customers: B2B companies and independent newsletter, podcast, and social media creators

🎳Team size: 2–10 employees

🌱 Stage: Pre-seed

💰 Investment amount: €1.03M ($1.2M)

🚀 Funded by: Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and strategic angel investors.

👁️‍🗨️ Investor’s perspective: “There is no better team to be building this company,” said Vital Laptenok, general partner at Flyer One Ventures. “Vida has been the marketer who needed this and could not buy it. Abhishek has been the creator on the other end of the table. But beyond the founder market fit, as a team they have a winning combination of ambition, resilience and talent that we love backing at F1V.”

💡 It will be spent on… The company is launching its new platform and building infrastructure to help B2B companies grow their brands and audiences through independent media channels.

💬 In their own words: “For years, B2B marketing relied on ads, PR and SEO. But audiences have moved to new media channels - newsletters, podcasts, LinkedIn, X. In direct-to-consumer space, that shift turned influencer marketing into one of the biggest line items in the budget. B2B is next”, said Vida Stanić, Founder and CEO of Astute.

💪 Their specialty… Astute combines two AI agents to automate both sides of creator partnerships. Its company-side agent monitors more than one million creator posts per minute, identifies mentions of a company and its competitors, recommends creators and partnerships, and measures impressions, conversions, brand score and visibility in AI search engines.

🔑 Business model: B2B new media platform

💸 Funding so far: €1.03M ($1.2M)

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