For years, the winning strategy for advertising on Meta was sophisticated audience targeting.

The flow for businesses selling on the platform was to build a polished creative campaign, find the right audience segments, optimise the funnel and execute. Retarget towards the types of people the campaign was resonating with. Creative was important, but it was secondary to targeting precision. Agencies charged $10,000 or more per campaign and took two to three weeks to deliver.

In late 2024, as platforms shifted to algorithmic content distribution, Meta rolled out its Andromeda algorithm and targeting precision stopped being the primary driver of outcomes. Creative became the lever to optimise. The algorithm now decides who sees what based on how they respond to the content itself. TikTok and YouTube followed suit.

The rules of advertising performance fundamentally shifted. Performance is now effectively determined by how many variations you test and how quickly you refresh underperforming ads.

Ads that get shown too many times to the same audiences lose up to 60% of their performance. Brands that publish 50–80 new ad variations per week systematically outperform those on traditional two-to-four week creative cycles. The new game requires continuous, high-volume creative production and the existing infrastructure to produce it was built for a world that no longer exists.

Enter Cuttable.

Cuttable is an AI-powered creative production platform for digital advertising. Rather than acting as a generic ad generation tool, it automates the entire workflow, from conversational briefing and brand learning, through to producing 20–50 platform-native video and image variations at scale, and closing the loop with real-time performance data from ad accounts.

The company was founded in July 2024 by Sam Kroonenburg (CEO), Ed Ring (COO) and Jack White. Sam previously co-founded and led A Cloud Guru to a $2 billion exit, building a category-defining business in cloud education and scaling it globally from Australia (Sam is also a Founder Partner at Glitch Capital). Ed brings deep operational and consumer brand experience from Swisse, a business that exited for $1.7 billion.

Glitch Capital participated in Cuttable's Pre-Series A round alongside Square Peg, Airtree, Benjamin Duncan and Rampersand.

There has been a structural change in how the world's largest advertising platforms deliver performance.

Meta's algorithm now optimises delivery using computer vision and engagement signals. It reads the creative itself. Effectively, the more variations you give it to test, the better it gets at finding the right messages for the right people. A brand that can produce 50 fresh ads this week will systematically outperform one that launched one polished campaign in the same week. On the major online platforms, creative volume and iteration speed have become the primary driver of advertising ROI.

The problem is that the creative production infrastructure most brands rely on was built for the old model. Agencies operate on project-based, two-to-three week cycles, charging $10,000 or more per campaign. In-house teams of two to five people, the size most mid-market brands run, aren't resourced to produce dozens of new ads every week. As a result, brands burning $50,000 a month on Meta might only have capacity for five to ten new creatives per fortnight. Performance insights expire before new ads can be launched. Budgets get allocated to push fatigued creative. Return on Ad Spend suffers.

This gap between what platforms now demand and what existing workflows can produce is costing brands real money, today.

The defensibility here is not the underlying AI model. Models are commoditising fast, and Cuttable and everyone else can buy access to the same frontier capabilities. The durable edge is the closed loop Cuttable runs for each brand: brief → generate → publish → iterate → learn.

Every campaign feeds real performance data from the ad account back into the system, and that data makes the next round of creative for that brand measurably better. Over time, each customer's account becomes a compounding, proprietary performance asset: a model of what works for that specific brand, audience and platform that a generic generation tool cannot replicate. The longer a brand stays, the better its results get and the more painful it is to leave.

This data flywheel, not the model, is the core of why Cuttable should get harder to displace the longer it runs.

One of the things we find most compelling about Cuttable is who it competes with: in practice, almost no one. Cuttable rarely loses a deal to a direct competitor.

What it replaces is the cobbled-together stack mid-market brands run today: Canva for design, ChatGPT for copy, and a lot of manual DIY stitched in between. There is no incumbent that owns this performance-creative workflow; Cuttable is creating it.

That makes this a category-creation story rather than an incumbent-displacement one. Creating a category is harder and slower than taking share from an established player, since you have to teach the market a new way of working. But the prize is owning the category outright rather than fighting over a sliver of someone else's. And it speaks to the scale of the opportunity: Cuttable isn't a better version of an existing tool, it's the system a newly-rewritten advertising model now requires.

US execution is the core to Cuttable’s growth potential and is built on three things: the prize, the proof, and the people.

The prize. The US market is roughly 70 times the size of Australia’s.

The proof. Cuttable won its first US customers inbound, off the back of Meta ads and before it had any US presence on the ground. Acquiring customers in a market you aren't physically in is a rare product-portability signal.

The people. The single biggest swing factor here, cracking the US from Australia, is the exact thing this founding team has already done. Sam built A Cloud Guru into a category-defining global software business from Australia into the US once before. The hardest part of the journey is the part the founder has the most direct, hard-won evidence of being able to execute, which materially de-risks it.

Founder quality is always important. At this stage of Cuttable, a young business with metrics still maturing and meaningful execution risk ahead, the team is the primary risk to underwrite.

Sam built A Cloud Guru from nothing to over $100 million in revenue, serving millions of users globally. He is a rare example of a founder able to identify a structural market shift early and build a category-defining product around it. He brings technical depth, product instinct, and hard-earned credibility with customers, partners, and future capital providers.

Ed complements this with operational discipline and consumer brand experience. His operational experience spans building a consumer brand at Hector’s Deli to marketing and growth at Swisse, a vitamin health company that eventually exited for $1.7B. Ed’s prior experience is particularly relevant given Cuttable's DTC-heavy customer base.

Together, they've shown real learning velocity: rebuilding the product, correcting the ICP, moving to the US and improving retention, all within months of launch.

The strongest signal that this market is real is who has shown up to compete for it.

In the past year a series of well-funded players have started to tackle the same problem. ElevenLabs has moved beyond voice into a creative suite, ElevenCreative, with an AI ad generator and a node-based production pipeline it calls Flows. Other entrants include AI generated actor and avatar startups, Arcads and Creatify.

This validates the market Cuttable is attacking. But Cuttable has a clear head start: a laser focus on marketing performance, a product built around the end-to-end production workflow rather than a general-purpose model, and a data flywheel that is already turning, compounding a per-brand performance edge that point tools cannot replicate.

The US is the biggest prize, and the biggest risk. Cuttable has won a material portion of their ARR from the US, and has since opened a New York office to build on that, though it is early.

Going from zero to a repeatable go-to-market motion there, run from Australia, is hard, and under-resourcing it risks validating the market without capturing it.

We took comfort in two things: the staged nature of US expansion (headcount scales after early signal validation, not before), and the Meta pilot providing warm introductions into US advertisers.

This investment is earlier than Glitch's typical stage with some metrics we needed to get comfortable with.

What moved us was the intersection of three things: Meta's Andromeda change that has left every mid-market brand without the creative infrastructure they now need; an extremely strong founder set, whose response to early adversity was specific, fast, and unsentimental; and customers in diligence who talked not about features but about hours reclaimed and workflows they couldn't imagine rebuilding.

We're backing Sam, Ed and the Cuttable team to build that system and own the category before anyone else does.