Hollywood heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg has thrown his support behind an AI advertising startup called Creatify, leading its Series A round with $1.5 million via WndrCo. Katzenberg is also taking a board seat at the two-year-old firm, which claims more than 1.5 million global users and 10,000 teams using its tech to create social media-centric video ads, leveraging AI avatars and real-time testing. Marketing teams can use its tools to “spin up high-quality video creative in minutes (not weeks),” the company claims, mentioning a client that uses Creatify to generate 1,000-plus ads per month.

‘I’ve spent my career looking for the tools that give storytellers an edge. That’s why I’m excited about AI video,” Katzenberg tells Fast Company. “Brands today need hundreds of custom ads across dozens of platforms, fast and cost-effectively. Traditional production just can’t keep up, but AI can. That’s what makes it a game changer.

“Making a video ad used to take weeks, cost thousands of dollars, and require a full creative team, so we built the first AI-powered video ad generator that could turn a product link into a high-converting video ad in minutes, at a fraction of the cost,” Creatify explains in a blog post.

The platform “has quietly reached $9 million in annual recurring revenue just 18 months after launch,” Fast Company reports, noting that this latest round, co-led by Kindred Ventures, “brings Creatify’s total funding to $23 million.”

Creatify’s fresh infusion of funds will support the launch of AdMax, “an end-to-end AI-powered advertising agent that automates creative inspiration, production, testing, and performance optimization — all within one platform,” Unite.AI writes, listing as key features:

• Ad Monitoring: Turns top competitor and category ads into actionable campaigns.
• AI-Powered Video Generation: Creates dozens of UGC-style and product showcase videos in minutes.
• 700+ AI-Generated Avatars: Enables multilingual, cross-platform video production without the traditional costs.
• Creative Testing Engine: Optimized for platforms like Meta and TikTok, designed to maximize ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
• API Access & Team Workspaces: Streamlines video production at scale while maintaining brand.

San Francisco-based Creatify was launched by “a trio of engineers who previously built video ad products at Snap, Meta , Airbnb and Meta’s AI research lab FAIR,” writes Fast Company.

Cofounder and CEO Yinan Na, “says his experience working on Snap Spotlight and Meta video ads taught him that great creative content, when guided by the right algorithms, naturally finds its audience,” reports Fast Company.