Singapore-based Martech startup, Affable.ai has raised USD 2 million from Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital & SGInnovate. Affable’s AI-driven, Self-service SaaS platform helps brands and agencies run high impact influencer marketing campaigns. Affable brings transparency and analytics to influencer marketing and is being used by over 45 top brands and agencies including Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, Dentsu, and We Communications. The company tracks more than Three Million Influencers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. With the fresh funding, Affable plans to expand into international markets such as the U.S.
Affable was founded by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain in 2017 as part of the Entrepreneur First cohort. The end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform allows brands and agencies to streamline their influencer strategies throughout the planning, discovery, activation, and reporting phases. Affable uses advanced machine learning and big data analytics to help brands find influencers, manage and measure campaign performance. With the influencer marketing process being extremely manual, time-consuming and completely based on guesswork, Affable provides brands with data-driven insights and analytics to help streamline their micro-influencer marketing process.
A global rise in digital consumption continues to propel influencer marketing campaigns among brands across all sectors. Being a mobile-first region along with its youthful demography and growing popularity of social platforms, Southeast Asia has become an ideal ground for influencer marketing to flourish and the market is estimated to reach $2.59 billion by 2024. Globally, the industry is very bullish and is pegged to reach $15 billion by next year. A primary reason for this growth is largely attributed to the large numbers of internet users and the majority of them using smartphones. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the influencer marketing wave across the world. Cooped up at home, users are spending more time on social networking, gaming, and watching OTT content. The huge amounts of time spent online has prompted brands to work more with social media influencers on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to connect with their consumers. Subsequently, Micro-influencers/ Micro-celebrities can drive a much higher reach at a much lower cost.
However, with up to 6X ROI on micro-influencer marketing budgets, brands are still struggling to find relevant influencers and measure their effectiveness. Traditionally, the influencer marketing process involves finding influencers, vetting audience quality, tracking & measuring results manually. Affable has not only made this process automated but also intelligent by building proprietary algorithms around its data infrastructure where it uses advanced ML and image processing models for accurate influencer-brand mapping and measuring campaign ROIs. The platform detects fake followers, discovers follower interests and classifies social media users based on brands, fan pages etc. Affable indexes all the social media users and identifies potential influencers that a brand could work with. Using Affable, marketers can find influencers, manage them campaign-wise, and measure post-campaign analytics such as engagement from the in-target audience, influencer success(as a group and individually), measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign, as well as measure clicks and sales.
Including the current funding round, Affable has raised USD 2.8 million from Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital, SGInnovate, Entrepreneur First and strategic angel investors. Headquartered in Singapore, the startup has 20 employees working remotely across different geographies.
