Melbourne-founded AI advertising startup Cuttable has raised A$20 million in Series A funding and relaunched its platform to help ecommerce brands create and optimise advertising campaigns using their own performance data. The round was led by Airtree Ventures, with participation from existing investors Square Peg, Rampersand and Glitch Capital. The company will use the funding to expand its teams in Melbourne, New York and San Francisco and continue developing its AI advertising technology.
The investment accompanies a broader expansion of Cuttable’s platform, which previously focused on generating advertising creative. The updated product adds capabilities to identify which ads brands should produce next and use campaign results to inform future content, connecting creative production with advertising performance and ecommerce data.
Connecting Advertising Performance With AI Content Creation
Cuttable’s platform uses AI to analyse advertising results, product catalogues and existing creative assets to recommend and generate new campaigns. Rather than relying solely on text prompts, the system draws on a brand’s photography, video and business data to produce advertising content tailored to its products and performance objectives. Marketers retain the ability to edit and approve the generated materials before publication.
The platform operates across three stages: identifying which ads to create, producing content in multiple formats and using campaign results to improve subsequent advertising. It connects with Meta and TikTok for campaign performance and publishing, Shopify for product and inventory data, and marketing tools including Klaviyo, ProfitPeak, Triple Whale, Northbeam and Motion. These integrations allow the system to incorporate factors such as product availability and previous campaign performance when recommending new advertising content.
The relaunch follows Cuttable’s analysis of more than 280,000 advertisements and US$260 million in Meta advertising expenditure across 680 ecommerce brands over the previous year. According to the company, brands needed approximately 42 ads to identify one that meaningfully improved business performance, while 1% of ads generated half of all attributed revenue. Nearly half of the analysed ads lost money, and more than one-third generated no revenue.
“Everyone has taught AI to make ads. Almost nobody has taught the ads to learn. Every ad a brand runs tells it something about its customers, but most teams switch it off and start the next one from scratch. We hold onto what each ad learned and put it straight into the next. It’s what we set out to build from day one, and I’m incredibly proud of the team for getting us here. Early customer feedback has been amazing,” said Sam Kroonenburg, CEO and co-founder of Cuttable.
Series A to Support International Expansion
Cuttable currently works with more than 440 ecommerce brands across the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Europe. Its customers include lululemon, Cotton On, July, Kathmandu and Conserving Beauty. According to the company, brands using its platform achieve an average return on advertising spend of 4.4 times, while campaign production timelines have decreased from two to three weeks to approximately one day.
The A$20 million Series A was led by Airtree Ventures, which previously backed A Cloud Guru, the cloud computing education company founded by Kroonenburg and sold in 2021 for more than US$2 billion. Square Peg, which led Cuttable’s seed round, returned alongside Rampersand and Glitch Capital. Cuttable’s existing investor base also includes Brand Fund by Previously Unavailable, which has supported the company since its seed stage.
The new capital will support product development and hiring across Cuttable’s operations in Melbourne, New York and San Francisco. The company is expanding its platform beyond AI-generated advertising content towards a system that connects creative production, campaign performance and business data to inform future advertising decisions.
The updated platform is available now, with the launch taking place ahead of the Black Friday shopping period, when ecommerce brands typically increase their advertising activity.
