Tech
Modash is flipping the influencer marketing script by connecting brands with the long tail of creators
Estonia-based startup Modash has raised a $12 million Series A led by henQ, a Dutch VC firm that prides itself in “funding the odd ones.” And what’s odd about Modash, according to CEO Avery Schrader, is that its team “has a really strong opinion in a space that nobody really has much faith in anymore.”
The space in question is influencer marketing. Like competitors CreatorIQ and Upfluence, Modash helps brands like Farfetch discover people who can promote their message. But instead of focusing on content creators with big followings, Modash scrapes open data to let its clients find matches among the long tail of the 250 million creators it says it lists (unless they opt out.)
This means brands are being connected with relatively niche content creators through Modash’s platform. But — the founders’ theory is — these are individuals who can pack a marketing punch as their smaller follower bases may be more engaged with, and put a higher store on, what they’re saying.
Essentially, it’s a flipping of the usual influencer marketing script which could help circumvent some of the cynicism that’s sprung up around highly paid influencers shilling products. Not having creators sign in also makes it easier to scale, in a space where pure marketplaces have struggled.
This is why Modash remains bullish on the creator economy — even as Schrader understands why others might not be. “The whole VC class has already placed one or two bets that have already gone down the drain in the space,” he told TechCrunch.
“[But] people miss the point that the creator is the atomic unit of the internet, and [creators] will just keep making stuff,” he went on, explaining why he and his team believe in the marketing power of content creators and in the market opportunity of helping them monetize.
“Whatever you immediately think of when you think ‘influencer’… I think it really has a negative connotation… Whatever you don’t consume is what you think of an influencer as, and then whatever you consume, whatever is in your own YouTube search history, that’s who we support,” he added. “It’s like the small creators doing the weirdest stuff, talking about the things they really love.”
The 26-year-old Canadian fits the bill himself; originally from Nova Scotia where he tinkered with videos and forums, he made his way to Estonia after reading that it was becoming “the Silicon Valley of Europe.” There, he soon found himself recording podcast episodes with the Baltics technorati, while trying his hand at influencer marketing for clients like Estonian scale-up Bolt.
The client side of the problem is key to Modash. The startup’s vision is that brands want an end-to-end platform that lets them source creators, but also analyze campaigns, manage payments, and more. That’s what it monetizes, with plans starting from $199 a month up to a custom enterprise tier.
With Bolt and an Estonian agency among its first clients, Tallinn proved to be a great launchpad for Modash. Whether or not the comparison with Silicon Valley stands, network effects were clearly at play and several Estonian founders became Modash’s first mentors and angels, some of whom have returned to join its latest round too.
The capital city is also where Schrader met his co-founder and CTO, Estonian software engineer Hendry Sadrak (on the right in the picture above) and the rest of their founding team. “Even today, 40% or 50% of the company is in Estonia,” said Schrader. “Lots of them from Bolt, Pipedrive, Transferwise… — the Estonian mafia.”
If Schrader sounded unsure about the exact percentage of local staffers it’s a reflection of how much the team has grown over the last few months. “We were like 25 [people] in the beginning of the year, we’re now 60, and we’ve set a cap for next year that we won’t go beyond 99, because it’s really important to keep the team as small as we can.”
Many of Modash’s new hires will focus on data engineering, as AI-enabled discovery features are a big part of its product roadmap.
In addition, the startup plans to recruit people for customer-facing roles in North America to be closer to its clients there.
Schrader himself was back in Canada when he talked to TechCrunch, and he told us he plans to spend at least half his time in the country going forward. International expansion and an increased focus on e-commerce will be the startup’s priorities leading up to its Series B round, he said.
Tech
Google’s Gemini nears billion-user milestone
Google is about to add another name to its long list of products with more than a billion users, a list that already includes Search, Gmail, Drive, Android, YouTube, and Chrome. The company said during its Q2 2026 call that the AI assistant Gemini now has over 950 million monthly users.
The company noted that Gemini users have tripled from last year. Earlier, in February, it said that the Gemini app crossed 750 million monthly active users. With this growth, Google’s assistant is in line to compete more closely with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which hit 1 billion monthly active users in June.
“Users love new agentic features like Daily Brief and our personalized agent, Gemini Spark, which is now available in the U.S. and internationally. We’ve been shipping helpful new features like this at an incredible pace,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during the call.
Apart from users on Android, the Gemini app has found a strong user base on iOS with launches like the Nano Banana image generation model. According to Appfigures, the app has been downloaded over 137 million times on iOS in the last 12 months.
In its latest “State of AI” report, the analytics firm Sensor Tower noted that ChatGPT’s market share among AI assistants fell below 50% for the first time. The report, which looked at H1 2026, also noted that Gemini’s share rose to 27.7%.
Many people already use AI assistant apps as a substitute for search. However, Google reported that its search vertical is going strong, partially thanks to the AI-centric overhaul. During this quarter, its Q&A-style AI mode crossed 1 billion users. The company said that it is driving “an incremental increase” in search queries. Google also noted that through hardware engineering, it has reduced the cost of AI mode for the company, despite introducing new models and features.
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Tech
Google will now let you sign in to your account with a selfie video
Google is adding a selfie video option as a new way for users to log in to their accounts, the company announced on Thursday, joining a growing wave of tech companies betting that biometrics and not passwords are the future of identity verification online. The tech giant says selfie videos give users more options to sign in if they’re ever locked out or don’t have access to their usual phone or computer.
Users set up a selfie video by looking at their device’s camera and completing a few guided head movements — think turning right or left or nodding — to capture multiple angles of their face. If a user is having trouble signing in later, they can take another selfie video to get back into their account, and Google will then compare the new video to the one used at setup to confirm it’s the correct person.
The bigger challenge Google is trying to solve is proving a real human, not a bot or a doctored video, is on the other side of the camera. “When you use a selfie to sign in, we use multiple layers of security to help prevent impersonation attempts like fake photos and videos (i.e., deep fakes),” Google wrote in the blog post. “For example, we match your video against your saved selfie and require you to perform simple movements to prove it’s a live video. We also use our standard security practices to detect and help prevent suspicious sign-in attempts.”
This isn’t just about individual accounts, though. As AI-generated video gets more convincing, “liveness” checks are becoming a baseline requirement for any company handling logins, payments, or sensitive data.
Although the new option could help protect accounts against fraud and help users recover locked accounts, it also raises concerns around user privacy and biometric data collection, an area regulators have increasingly scrutinized as more companies build products around facial and voice data.
Google says selfie videos are stored securely using encryption and remain protected even when they’re not being used, and that users can choose to delete the videos from their Google account at any time.
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Tech
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction
Meta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.
“Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover says. “We couldn’t disagree more.”
Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.
“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the voiceover says. “The future is for everyone.”
That’s a nice sentiment — pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song “Five Years.”
If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about.
“I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth,” he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass-extinction event in five years.
If you’re not familiar with Bowie’s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word “people” over and over again, and without the context of the song, it’s not clear what it’s about.
But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying
We “had five years left to cry in” and the “earth was really dying.” It’s pretty bleak.
It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,” he wrote alongside the video. “As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone. We’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.”
Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta’s Oculus used to give new hires copies of the science fiction novel “Ready Player One,” which is set in a dystopia in which a tech company making virtual reality products becomes overly powerful and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited inspiration from the movie “Her,” which warns us about what can go wrong when we use AI for emotional support. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance systems for the government, is named after Palantir, a seeing stone from the “Lord of the Rings” franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit about the “accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey,” a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.
Meta isn’t alone in its recent promotional foibles. Instead of racing to build AGI, the top AI companies seem to be fighting over who can make the creepiest advertisement. A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an eerie video of its own. As my colleague Lucas Ropek described it:
The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up.
Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”
Anthropic is trying to convince us that it understands the risks AI poses to society, and therefore, this is the company that people can trust to develop AI responsibly. The message it actually conveys feels closer to the mood of Bowie’s “Five Years.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the Anthropic ad, “I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.”
As these companies spar to control the public perception of AI, their efforts don’t seem to be making much progress. A recent Pew survey found that only 16% of Americans think that AI’s impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, and 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Better luck next time, Meta.
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