Uplane wants to replace marketing agencies with AI — and it just raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
The San Francisco-based startup has a platform where brands can launch and test ad campaigns on digital channels like Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn, and steer their ad spending toward the best-performing ones. Uplane also lets clients launch and test website landing pages.
Clients can upload their own ads or use Uplane to make AI-generated visuals. Uplane works on text and video ads.
The startup’s seed funding round was led by Play Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, 20VC, Rebel Fund, and Multimodal Ventures.
Julius Körfgen, Lukas Vollmer, and Marvin Abdel-Massih founded Uplane in November. They’re targeting companies that spend $100,000 or more a month on digital marketing and charging them an annual fee. So far, clients include Aonic, a wellness company cofounded by Kim Kardashian’s personal trainer; Wagetap, an Australian fintech company; and German railroad Deutsche Bahn.
Körfgen said that overall, its clients have improved their return on ad spending by 30% in about six weeks, compared to their agencies’ performance — with Aonic, the improvement in return was 60%.
Körfgen said Uplane enabled Deutsche Bahn to do the same work its big agency used to in a fraction of the time.
“They’re literally taking them off many of or all of the tasks in the campaigns that we manage now,” he said.
Anton Backman, general partner at Play Ventures, said his firm was impressed by Uplane’s early signs of success in demonstrating the payoff from ad spending.
2 of Uplane’s founders came from performance marketing
Körfgen said he got the idea for Uplane while working with Abdel-Massih at Enpal, a German performance marketing company. He realized that the measurable work he did could be improved with AI, from creating ads and landing pages to tracking and improving their performance. They teamed up with Vollmer, who was looking to start a new company.
“Each of those steps, AI can do faster and better than humans,” Körfgen said. “And right now, only really large marketing teams can achieve this.”
A number of agencies and marketing companies offer solutions similar to Uplane, including investment-backed players like Smartly and startup Pomo.
Uplane is limited by AI’s capabilities. It’s not yet offering audio as part of its ads, for example. Its focus is on measurable outcomes, not helping brands with their overall strategic direction or story. Using external agencies can also give a brand a useful independent perspective.
Uplane plans to use the new funding to grow its 15-person team, bring on new customers, and integrate with more ad platforms.
Check out the pitch deck Uplane used to secure its $4.5 million seed investment, shared exclusively with CMO Insider:
