Clouted

Nobody believes in you, so make them. Welcome to the distribution-first era. https://t.co/HFWIExr7b1

Clouted is building marketing infrastructure for the short-video era, automating the work of turning long-form content like songs, podcasts, and films into clips engineered to travel across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. The platform coordinates a network of more than 100,000 gig creators to edit clips, then uses AI to decide which platforms and audiences to target, running continuous tests so each campaign teaches the next one what formats and channels actually convert. It's aimed at brands, labels, studios, and marketing agencies that have been hand-managing armies of clippers and guessing at distribution. The launch matters now because the company just closed a $7M seed led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Gold House Ventures, Weekend Fund, and Peak XV's Surge, and is using the round to scale its Distribution Intelligence platform beyond music into film, gaming, and consumer brands. Clouted came out of a16z Speedrun in 2024 and already counts partners like BMG, Lionsgate, and Monstercat, positioning itself against clipping tools like Overlap AI while pointing at CreatorIQ and Hightouch as the longer-term comparison. The team is led by CEO Justin Banusing, who previously used the underlying tech to grow the Manila electronic music festival &Friends to a 20,000-person event, alongside COO Adriel Yong and CTO Kairui Zeng, working out of Los Angeles. The launch video, a montage of an aspiring musician being told to make himself viral, is a fairly direct statement of the thesis: in a distribution-first market, attention is something you manufacture, and Clouted wants to be the system that manufactures it.

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