Clouted wants to take the guesswork out of making short videos go viral

It feels like short video clips of podcasts, songs, and movies are now suddenly all over social media, and that’s no coincidence. Brands have realized that the format offers a very cost-effective way to bring products to market.

Brands and marketing agencies often outsource the process of finding the most compelling 30 to 90 seconds of a video, known as clipping, to independent creators. But managing these gig workers and determining where exactly to distribute these videos poses a huge operational challenge.

Knockeda startup that completed a16z’s Speedrun accelerator in 2024 is building the infrastructure to automatically handle both the distribution strategy and the logistics of the clipping process. The platform uses a network of more than 100,000 performance creators to edit clips and then uses AI to determine the best social media platform and audience to promote them.

Clout co-founder and CEO Justin Banusing first applied the company’s technology to his personal passion: electronic music and festival production. As a DJ, he used Clouted to promote and grow &Friends, a Manila-based electronic dance music and pop culture festival that now attracts more than 20,000 people.

Clouted’s approach has attracted investor interest. The startup just announced a $7 million seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, Peak XV’s Surge, and others.

Unlike purely volume-driven marketing tools, Clouted doesn’t just chase high clip numbers. Instead, the AI ​​runs a continuous testing cycle, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to find out what actually performs best. The practical effect is that each campaign makes the next more targeted and efficient, as the system collects data on what works.

Clouted works somewhat like penetration testing for social media algorithms – a concept borrowed from cybersecurity, where researchers probe a system’s defenses by attempting to breach them. Instead of looking for security flaws, Clouted’s AI and its network of creators test thousands of different clipping and distribution approaches to identify what makes a piece of content go viral.

“The result is that every campaign Clouted runs makes the next one faster, smarter and more effective,” Banusing told TechCrunch. “The platform learns which formats win, which audiences convert and which distribution channels expand over time.”

While Clouted competes directly with similar startups like Overlap AI in the automated clipping space, Banusing says he sees bigger marketing infrastructure players, specifically CreatorIQ and Hightouch, as the ultimate competition. Hightouch recently surpassed $100 million in ARR, indicating that its enterprise marketing infrastructure is large and expanding. That is the market that Clouted is ultimately building towards.