San Francisco-based startup GIGR (dba Playad) has raised $5.4 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development of AI marketing agents designed to help teams create, test, and improve advertising creative with less manual work and less guesswork.
The round was led by BRV Capital Management and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with participation from angel investors including Bora Chung, a Krafton board member and former Bill.com executive, Jihun Yu, founder of Hyprsense (acquired by Epic Games), and Krew Capital.
GIGR said its product, Playad, is built around a multi-agent workflow intended to support the full creative lifecycle—briefing, production, experimentation, measurement, and iteration—so marketing teams can run more tests and incorporate performance signals faster. The company’s thesis is that the next step-change in marketing performance will come from AI-native workflows that turn feedback into repeatable creative iteration, rather than standalone point tools.
Playad’s initial focus is interactive, “playable” ads, particularly in gaming, where formats can capture granular engagement signals such as taps, swipes, and user choices. GIGR argues that these signals make it easier to understand not only whether a creative worked, but how users engaged, improving the clarity of what to build next. The company said Playad, which launched in the third quarter of 2025, aims to make interactive ads faster to produce and easier for marketers to own, reducing reliance on specialized developers while enabling rapid A/B testing through quick creation of multiple variations.
While interactive formats are the starting wedge, GIGR positioned Playad as a broader AI-native creative platform intended to support creation and iteration across image, video, and interactive formats within a single system.
GIGR said customers initially adopt Playad for speed, but continue using it for the workflow-driven iteration loop that ties creation more directly to performance learning. The company cited customer-reported outcomes, including large reductions in production costs—up to 90% in some cases—alongside improvements in acquisition efficiency.
The company also highlighted its seven-founder structure, describing a team of long-time collaborators with distinct ownership areas. CEO and co-founder Jay Jaeyeon Cho previously led AI game studios at Bagelcode, where the company said he contributed to growth to more than 50 million users and roughly $70 million in annual revenue. Co-founder Steve Nam Hyuk Chung’s background includes investment banking, strategy, and business development roles at Bank of America, PlayStation, YouTube, and 20th Century Fox, and he holds degrees from MIT and Wharton. Co-founder Jayden Hyun Jae Park has led engineering teams building production systems, including as a tech lead at Devsisters, with experience scaling AI-driven products from prototypes to production. The remaining founders—Simon, Arthur, Daniel, and Youn—were described as having engineering training at Stanford and POSTECH, and experience in high-intensity problem-solving.
KEY QUOTES:
“Marketing performance increasingly depends on how quickly teams can learn from creative – and act on it. We’re building AI agents that make iteration the default, so teams can quickly apply what’s already working across the market to their next creative without sacrificing quality.”
Steve Chung, Co-founder, GIGR
“We’re not trying to simply produce ‘more assets.’ We’re building a system where every launch creates learning – and that learning directly improves the next creative decision. Creative is the most important lever for improving ROAS in modern marketing, and we are going beyond just efficiency gains to help businesses eliminate uncertainty across their decisions when it comes to digital advertising.”
Jay Cho, CEO and Co-founder, GIGR
