 San Francisco–based startup GIGR (dba. Playad) today announced it has raised $5.4 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the development of AI marketing agents that help teams create, test, and improve advertising creative with less manual work and less guesswork.
The round was led by BRV Capital Management and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with participation from angel investors including Bora Chung (board member at Krafton and former executive at Bill.com), Jihun Yu (founder of Hyprsense, acquired by Epic Games), and Krew Capital. Even with modern tooling, producing effective ad creative is still slow, fragmented, and expensive. Teams move from briefs to handoffs to revisions, then stitch together performance insights after the fact - often without a clear path to what to build next. GIGR's view is that the next leap in marketing won't come from yet another tool. It will come from an AI-native workflow that turns performance signals into faster iteration - so creatives improve with every cycle. That is what GIGR is building: a multi-agent marketing workflow designed to support the full creative lifecycle - briefing, production, experimentation, measurement, and iteration - so teams can run more tests and learn faster. GIGR's product, Playad (launched 3Q 2025) starts where the signal is strongest: interactive ads. Especially in gaming, these formats are widely used because they often drive higher conversion at lower CPI by letting users experience the product. They also capture granular actions - taps, swipes, and choices - making iteration clearer by showing not just whether a creative worked, but how users engaged. Industry analysis shows playable ad performance reached record highs in 2025, reinforcing the growing effectiveness of interactive formats. Historically, however, interactive ads have been powerful yet impractical - slow to build, prohibitively expensive, and dependent on specialized developers. Playad makes them fast enough to iterate and simple enough for marketers to own, which changes creative from a bottleneck into a repeatable workflow at a fraction of cost. In addition, Playad is designed for rapid experimentation, and teams can A/B test interactive ads by instantly creating a wide range of variations. While interactive formats are the initial wedge, Playad is built as a broader AI-native creative platform, enabling teams to create and iterate across image, video, and interactive formats within a single system. "Marketing performance increasingly depends on how quickly teams can learn from creative - and act on it," said Steve Chung, co-founder of GIGR. "We're building AI agents that make iteration the default, so teams can quickly apply what's already working across the market to their next creative without sacrificing quality." Customers adopt Playad for speed, but what keeps them coming back is the workflow: teams can ship iterations faster, run more experiments, and tighten the loop between creation and performance. In practice, customers have reported meaningful outcomes, including major reductions in production cost - as much as 90% in some cases - alongside measurable improvements in acquisition efficiency. "We're not trying to simply produce 'more assets,'" said Jay Cho, CEO and co-founder of GIGR. "We're building a system where every launch creates learning - and that learning directly improves the next creative decision. Creative is the most important lever for improving ROAS in modern marketing, and we are going beyond just efficiency gains to help businesses eliminate uncertainty across their decisions when it comes to digital advertising. GIGR's founding team brings experience across high-growth startups and global technology companies, united by a single obsession: removing the bottleneck between creative iteration and ad performance. What sets the team apart is its seven-founder structure. GIGR was built by long-time collaborators who chose to start together - each owning a distinct problem space, and all committed to rebuilding broken marketing workflows.
About GIGR (Playad.ai) GIGR is building a multi-agent AI platform for marketing, starting with an AI-native creative workflow that makes interactive ads practical - while enabling iteration across image, video, and interactive formats in one system. Learn more at https://playad.ai. source[PR Newswire] Comments are closed.
|