Exclusive: This founder, who sold his first influencer agency at 17, just raised $4.3M to automate the industry

Fluencify has pulled in a $4.3 million pre-seed round, and the cheque came fast. The Stockholm-based AI marketing startup says the round was oversubscribed, led by byFounders, with Wave Ventures also joining in. The company is barely out of the gate: it was founded in 2025 and says it reached more than $2 million in annual recurring revenue within six months of launch.

That pace makes more sense when you look at the people behind it. Co-founder Erik Romdhane started making Instagram pages at 11, sold ad space and accounts by 13, and by 17 had launched an influencer marketing agency in London with two partners before selling his share. He built that business while still at high school in Stockholm. His co-founder Sam Stones Hälleberg also brings a sizable audience, and Romdhane says he has about 900,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, while Hälleberg has reached 1.4 million.

Fluencify’s pitch is blunt: hire ordinary people who do not already have an audience, then use AI to help them make content that performs. Romdhane says some of those new creators have crossed five million views on their first day on the platform. The company says it now has about 20,000 active creators and handles the full campaign stack for brands, from finding creators and briefing them to scheduling posts, running paid promotion and processing payments in more than 85 countries.

The startup is also trying to separate itself from the usual creator-marketplace model. Romdhane says Fluencify has no direct competitors in the European Union, and argues that U.S. players entering Europe use a different setup, where creators apply and managers review submissions. Fluencify instead goes directly to brands and runs campaigns through its own app. The new money will fund a push into the U.S., including a New York office focused on go-to-market work and customer success, while engineering stays in Stockholm.