Unity Influence raises $1 million to help bring influencer marketing to small business

Unity Influence, a machine learning startup, has raised $1 million to further develop its machine learning-based solution to connect micro-influencers with the small businesses who want to use their targeted reach for marketing purposes. Founded by Jacobo Lumbreras and Patrick Ip, the company just launched from its private beta to take on new customers. The founders had been mulling how to build an influencer marketing engine that would be more accessible to small businesses and arguably more successful than the standard AdWords campaigns and Facebook ads that are the typical ways that small businesses drive traffic online.

However, Unity isn’t alone in this space. Companies like Nuvi, Social Toaster, Izea, Scrunch and Babblebox all tout influencer marketing solutions. Most startups in the influencer advertising world require manual searches for influencers and manual approval of contracts. That creates additional costs and friction in the buying process, that Ip argues Unity alleviates. Brands spent around $570 million on influencer marketing, with the price range per post for influencers with between 500,000 and 1 million followers falls between $5,000 and $10,000.