Back to news
Investment notes

Investment Notes: Cuttable AU$5.5m Seed

We're excited to join the Cuttable team on their journey to transform how brands tell their stories. Cuttable is Australia’s first automated digital advertising agency, creating high-quality content quickly at scale while enhancing the creative experience for agencies.  

Cuttable combines the deep creative artistry and craft of advertising with the precision and speed of AI technology to empower brands and marketers to develop their own high-quality advertising campaigns in just a few clicks. What would typically take weeks or months to create now takes just minutes. 

Beginning with one foundation client just over a year ago, the team are already collaborating with some of Australia's largest brands, including Medibank, Catch.com.au, Nando’s, Wesfarmers, and Penfolds, and have ambitions to expand their product offering into other global markets.

Meet the team behind Cuttable

Cuttable was founded by highly awarded Australian marketer Jack White, the co-founder of creative agency Sunday Gravy; Ed Ring, ex-Swisse marketer and start-up founder; and Sam Kroonenburg, one of Australia’s most esteemed tech entrepreneurs and co-founder and CEO of A Cloud Guru, which sold for more than US$2 billion in 2021. The idea for Cuttable was incubated inside advertising agency Sunday Gravy before spinning out as a standalone business in 2023.

Advertising runs in Jack’s blood. His dad, Tony, sold his advertising agency to Clemenger in the 90s, and his brother is a highly awarded creative director in his own right. Jack tells us his goal is to create a media landscape with “no shit ads”, and this philosophy runs deep in Cuttable today. 

Over the last year, we have spent a lot of time with the Cuttable co-founders and are excited by their combination of deep domain expertise, tech acumen, grit and laser focus on using AI to reshape advertising.  We have known Sam for a number of years and admire how he built A Cloud Guru into one of Australia's great tech startup successes. 

The problem Cuttable is solving

The conventional marketing agency model was built in the context of the traditional media landscape, where media was highly concentrated and captured a large audience. In this context, brands produced high-quality and expensive campaigns that included only a relatively small number of creative pieces. Apple’s esteemed 1984 ad is the perfect example of this: it was aired only once.

As media consumption has evolved, particularly with the rise of on-demand streaming and short-form social video content, audiences have become increasingly fragmented, and the need for brands to produce content for a wide range of audiences and platforms has evolved. Marketers today must navigate a complex array of more than 25 diverse media channels, double the number of a decade ago. 

Given the sheer scale and volume of content required for modern advertising campaigns, brands need to produce a huge number of ads to resonate with each of their audience segments and tailor those ads to each of the channel’s specifications. For example, an ad produced for television won’t necessarily work on YouTube, and an ad created for Instagram won’t always work on TikTok. This is especially difficult for brands selling a large number of SKUs with changing prices. Modern retailers aim to have unique assets for every SKU that can be used on any channel. The combinatorial challenge for content teams is enormous.

To reliably produce such a large volume of ads, brands would traditionally either outsource to external media agencies or invest in an in-house creative agency at a significant cost. 

With Cuttable, brand marketers can now create ads for their entire media plan with just a few clicks and automate much of their workflow using generative AI. Cuttable uses AI to digest a brand's marketing material and guidelines, then generates video templates based on inputs and creates ads based on visual or written descriptions provided. Automating this time-consuming and costly process allows in-house brand marketers and their agencies to spend more time on brand strategy and focus on business priorities. 

What’s next for Cuttable?

The Cuttable team has ambitious plans to automate the entire advertising process. They have already begun developing their next big AI-powered feature, tentatively titled "the brand brain." This innovative tool will continuously capture and understand a brand's essence, driving all marketing strategies, campaign designs, copywriting and asset creation.

With this latest fundraising round, Cuttable plans to further expand its features, positioning itself as the go-to platform for brands to boost their consideration, making it easier to convert them to customers. The team is also continuing to grow, with Cuttable already attracting high-calibre talent who are excited to build the future of advertising.

We are grateful the Cuttable have chosen us to partner with them, and we are thrilled to welcome Sam, Jack, Ed, and the Cuttable Team to Square Peg!

Enjoyed this post?

Share with your network!