Clouted raises $7 million to automate short-form video distribution

Clouted, a Manila-based startup, has raised a $7 million seed round to build infrastructure that automates the distribution strategy and logistics of short-form video content. The funding round was led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, and Peak XV’s Surge. The startup previously went through the Speedrun accelerator operated by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in 2024, an accelerator program for gaming and consumer tech startups.

Brands and marketing agencies frequently outsource the process of finding the most compelling 30 to 90 seconds of a video, known as “clipping,” to independent creators. However, managing these gig workers and determining where to distribute those videos presents an operational challenge. To address this, Clouted’s platform taps into a network of over 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, and then uses artificial intelligence to determine the best social media platforms and target audiences for promoting them. Co-founder and CEO Justin Banusing, a longtime DJ, first applied this technology to promote and grow &Friends, a Manila-based electronic dance music and pop-culture festival that now draws over 20,000 people.

Unlike purely volume-driven marketing tools, Clouted does not just chase high clip counts. Instead, its AI operates a continuous testing loop, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to determine what performs best. Banusing compares this approach to penetration testing, a cybersecurity concept where researchers probe a system’s defenses by attempting to break them. Rather than looking for security flaws, Clouted’s AI and its creator network test thousands of different clipping and distribution approaches to identify what triggers a piece of content to go viral. “The platform learns which formats win, which audiences convert, and which distribution channels compound over time,” Banusing said.

Clouted enters a competitive landscape for automated video clipping and marketing infrastructure. The startup competes directly with Overlap AI in the automated clipping space. However, Banusing points to larger marketing infrastructure companies, specifically CreatorIQ and Hightouch, as the ultimate competition. The scale of this enterprise marketing infrastructure market is highlighted by Hightouch, which recently crossed $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), suggesting a large and expanding market that Clouted is ultimately building toward.

Why it matters

Clouted is building infrastructure for the enterprise marketing space, aiming to automate the distribution and logistics of short-form video content, a market segment that competitors like Hightouch have already demonstrated significant scale in.