It feels like short video clips from podcasts, songs, and movies are suddenly everywhere on social media right now, and that’s not an accident. Brands have realized that the format offers a highly cost-effective way to market products.

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 exactly where to distribute those videos presents a massive operational challenge.

Clouted, a startup that went through the 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 taps into a network of over 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, then uses AI to determine the best social media platform and target audience for promoting them.

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

Clouted’s approach has caught 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 counts. Instead, its AI operates a continuous testing loop, experimenting with different formats and channel strategies to figure out what actually performs best. The practical effect is that each campaign makes the next one more targeted and efficient, as the system accumulates 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 break them. Rather than 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.

“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 compound over time.”

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