Influencer marketing reshaped consumer brands. We believe B2B is next, and we're excited to announce our investment in Astute, the AI-native platform helping B2B companies find, book, and launch campaigns with the newsletters, podcasts, and creators their buyers already trust.
The problem.
B2B marketing has a blind spot. While influencer marketing has become one of the largest line items in consumer marketing budgets, B2B companies still have no real way to reach the newsletters, podcasts, and creators their buyers actually follow. Today, that means months of manual searching, cold outreach, and negotiation, with most of it going nowhere. Astute exists to fix that: AI-matched, end-to-end creator placements that used to take months, now live in minutes.
Why do we believe in it?
B2B creator content is becoming as core to brand marketing as influencer marketing already is in consumer. The audiences exist, millions of niche newsletters, podcasts, and LinkedIn voices reaching highly specific, high-intent B2B buyers. What's been missing is the infrastructure to match the right creator to the right company, at scale, without an army of manual outreach. That's exactly what Astute has built.
The team.
Astute was founded by Vida Stanic (CEO) and Abhishek Manikandan (CTO). Vida went from first commercial hire at FairHQ to an early growth hire at Fluidstack, where she helped take the company from a $2M to a $2B valuation in under a year, before leaving deliberately to build her own company. Abhishek studied Computer Science at Oxford, worked as an ML engineer at The Trade Desk, and independently built a large B2B engineering audience on YouTube. Together, they bring sales instinct, technical depth, and a firsthand understanding of the creators they're now helping companies reach.
Founders who build exceptional companies rarely follow conventional paths. Vida has repeatedly made bold decisions to maximize her learning, from moving countries at 17 to leaving great opportunities behind to build something of her own. That combination of ambition, resilience, and execution gave us strong conviction to back Astute." — Kristian Asani, Silicon Gardens
Since launch, Astute has moved quickly, signing on B2B customers across growth-stage and early-stage companies and building a fast-growing proprietary network of creators, all while proving measurable ROI in a space that has historically had none.
Welcome to Silicon Gardens, Astute!
Connect with us