Clouted aims to remove the guesswork from creating viral short videos

Short video clips from podcasts, songs, and movies are flooding social media—and it’s no coincidence. Brands have discovered this format offers a highly cost-effective way to market their products.

Brands and marketing agencies frequently outsource the task of identifying the most compelling 30–90 seconds of a video—a process known as “clipping”—to independent creators. However, managing these gig workers and deciding where to distribute those clips presents a significant operational challenge.

Clouted, a startup that completed the a16z Speedrun accelerator in 2024, is building an infrastructure to automatically manage both distribution strategy and the logistics of clipping. The platform leverages a network of over 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, then uses AI to identify the best social media platform and target audience for each piece of content.

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

Clouted’s approach has drawn investor interest. The startup recently 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 merely chase high clip counts. Instead, its AI runs a continuous testing loop, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to discover what actually performs best. The practical result is that each campaign makes the next one more targeted and efficient, as the system accumulates data on what works.

Clouted operates somewhat like penetration testing for social media algorithms—a concept borrowed from cybersecurity, where researchers probe a system’s defenses by attempting to break 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 triggers a piece of content to go viral.

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

While Clouted competes directly with similar startups like Overlap AI in the automated clipping space, Banusing said he views larger marketing infrastructure players—specifically CreatorIQ and Hightouch—as the ultimate competition. Hightouch recently surpassed $100 million in ARR, suggesting the enterprise marketing infrastructure space is large and still expanding. That’s the market Clouted is ultimately building toward.