In the high-stakes arena of digital advertising, where every click costs a fortune and creative teams scramble between briefs, revisions, and post-mortems, GIGR (dba Playad.ai) is rewriting the rules. The San Francisco startup just announced a $5.4 million pre-seed round to supercharge its multi-agent AI platform that transforms ad production from a fragmented guessing game into a feedback-driven machine. Led by BRV Capital Management and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with notable angels like Krafton’s Bora Chung and Hyprsense founder Jihun Yu joining the party, this funding signals big bets on AI’s power to crack marketing’s toughest nut: creative iteration.

Picture the typical ad workflow nightmare—marketers hand off briefs to designers, wait days for assets, launch blind, then scramble to decode performance data after the money’s spent. Playad flips that script with an AI-native system spanning briefing, production, experimentation, measurement, and iteration. Launched in Q3 2025, it kicks off with interactive ads (think playable game demos), where rich user signals like taps and swipes reveal not just if an ad worked, but how. These formats crush traditional banners in gaming—lower CPI, higher conversions—but were historically slow and pricey to build. Playad makes them fast, cheap, and marketer-owned, slashing production costs up to 90% while enabling endless A/B variations.

From One-Off Creatives to Learning Workflows

GIGR’s vision goes beyond assets; it’s about building intelligence. Multi-agent AI handles the full cycle: generate ideas from briefs, produce image/video/interactive variants, run rapid tests, analyze granular engagement data, and feed insights back to improve the next round. “Creative is the biggest ROAS lever in modern marketing,” says CEO Jay Jaeyeon Cho. “We’re eliminating uncertainty so every launch makes teams smarter.” Early customers rave about speed gains and acquisition efficiency, turning what was a bottleneck into a repeatable edge.

The Seven-Founder Powerhouse

What stands out is GIGR’s unusual seven-founder structure—longtime collaborators dividing and conquering distinct domains. CEO Jay Cho scaled AI game studios at Bagelcode to 50M users and $70M revenue. Steve Chung (MIT/Wharton) brings biz dev chops from PlayStation, YouTube, and Fox. Engineering lead Jayden Park built production AI at Devsisters, with the rest (Simon, Arthur, Daniel, Youn) hailing from Stanford/POSTECH with battle-tested builder mindsets. It’s a dream team obsessed with closing the gap between creative intuition and performance reality.

Timing the AI Ad Wave Perfectly

Playable ads hit record highs in 2025, proving interactivity wins when done right. GIGR/Playad scales that for everyone, starting in gaming but eyeing broader formats. In a martech world bloated with single-purpose tools, their end-to-end workflow feels fresh—learning from market signals to evolve creatives autonomously.

Conclusion: The Future of Marketing Is Agentic and Adaptive

GIGR’s $5.4M pre-seed isn’t just fuel for growth; it’s validation that AI agents will redefine ad creative from art to science. By making iteration the default, Playad empowers teams to test more, learn faster, and scale confidently amid rising ad costs. As marketing leans harder into performance, expect this multi-agent approach to disrupt incumbents and birth a new creative era. GIGR isn’t building another tool—they’re engineering the feedback loop that turns good ads into unstoppable campaigns.