Clouted raises $7M to take the guesswork out of creating viral shorts

Clouted raised $7M in a seed round led by Slow Ventures. The company automates the most tedious stage of video marketing: from a 2-hour podcast or concert, you need to cut out 30-90 seconds that will hook the audience and release them at the right time on the right platform.

The Problem They Solve

Currently, brands and marketing agencies hire independent creators on a gig basis — they manually cut videos, export them, and upload them. Coordinating 100+ freelancers is complicated: some work slower, quality varies, and it's unclear which format will actually work on TikTok versus YouTube Shorts.

How Clouted Changes This

The platform works like an autopilot for video marketing. It manages a network of over 100,000 gig creators who cut clips according to platform standards. But the main part is the AI.

Clouted tests like combat systems:

• Determines which social networks suit specific content (music on TikTok, business content on LinkedIn)
• Experiments with formats — vertical video, square, with text, without
• Runs A/B tests by the thousands — simultaneously tries 1,000 different options
• Fixes what worked and carries those insights to the next campaign
• Each round becomes smarter — the system learns from its own mistakes

Creator Justin Banusing applied the technology to himself: he used Clouted to promote &Friends — an electronic festival in Manila. Now 20,000+ people attend the festival.

"Every Clouted campaign makes the next one faster, smarter, and more effective.

The system learns which formats win, which audiences convert, and which channels grow exponentially," explains Banusing.

Competition and Market

The direct competitor is Overlap AI, which does automatic clipping. But Banusing sees real threats in larger platforms: CreatorIQ (for creator management) and Hightouch (marketing infrastructure). Hightouch recently reached $100M in annual revenue — this shows the video automation market is huge.

What This Means

Video content is finally transitioning to AI automation. Instead of hiring an expensive video editor, brands give long-form video to the system — it cuts, tests, and scales itself. This works for podcasts, music, films, education — anything where you need to extract interesting moments.