Company: Upfluence
Co-CEOs: Kevin Creusy & Vivien Garnès
Website: https://www.upfluence.com/
About Upfluence
Upfluence is the first agentic influencer and affiliate marketing platform built for e-commerce and DTC brands. The company was founded in 2012 by co-CEOs Kevin Creusy and Vivien Garnès, back when influencer marketing wasn’t yet a term. The company began San Francisco, but its global headquarters are now in New York.
Creusy and Garnès discovered the power of influencer marketing first-hand while running an e-commerce necktie business back in the early 2010s. They discovered the power of blogger recommendations. The co-CEOs sold off excess inventory thanks to those collaborations, but it took months to find, reach out to, and connect with bloggers to collaborate on marketing content. Creusy and Garnès realised there had to be a more streamlined way to work with creators, and Upfluence was born.
Getting Upfluence to where it is today required overcoming challenges that were as much cultural as technical. Influencer marketing didn’t have a clear identity when Upfluence launched. Garnès has described the early market as a mash-up of PR, word-of-mouth marketing, and SEO tactics, with many early clients simply wanting blog placements for backlinks rather than genuine creator partnerships.
Brands had to be convinced that handing messaging control to a creator was necessary for content to feel authentic and actually perform. This was a hard sell in an industry still building its own credibility. The platform evolved alongside these growing pains, pivoting in 2016 from an influencer marketplace into a full SaaS solution, and later expanding into affiliate tracking, e-commerce integrations, and creator payments.
Today, Upfluence has become the first fully agentic platform of its kind. Upfluence’s Jaice AI is built as a chain of specialised microservices. The agentic system is designed to run entire campaign workflows with far less human input – from writing briefs and setting budgets, to matching brands with creators, negotiating rates, and pushing collaborations through each stage of the funnel to content approval. Select clients are already using early agentic capabilities. Upfluence’s AI works like a team 10x the size of current human influencer marketing teams.
Upfluence’s impact on the US influencer marketing industry has been apparent. Clients include legacy American brands like Amazon, Marriott, New Balance, Universal, Verizon, and more. By tying creator discovery directly to e-commerce data, such as surfacing a brand’s own customers as potential influencers and attributing sales back to individual creators, Upfluence helped push the industry away from vanity metrics like follower counts and likes, towards ROI-based decision-making.
That data-driven approach, paired now with Upfluence’s move toward full autonomy, positions the company as the go-to platform for e-commerce brands to run creator programs at scale and speed. It’s a process that the co-CEOs imagined was possible, even as they were cold-emailing bloggers one at a time over a decade ago.
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