By Team BuzzBizzAI
7 Mar, 2026
A Dutch AI platform just raised €2M to automate the ads many marketers still run manually.
If you want a glimpse of where performance marketing might be heading, this story is less about funding and more about a quiet structural shift.
A Dutch startup called Aizy has raised €2 million in fresh funding and reached a €22 million valuation less than a year after launching. The company is betting that the traditional agency model, with its billable hours and manual optimization, is about to run into a serious efficiency problem.
The pitch is simple enough to fit in a single sentence. Let AI run the campaigns that humans still spend hours adjusting.
The automation layer under your ad account
Aizy was founded in 2024 by entrepreneur Stefan Nuijten and built as an AI-powered performance marketing platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Instead of hiring an agency to manage campaigns manually, companies plug the platform directly into their Google and Meta advertising accounts. The system then continuously adjusts budgets, targeting, and campaign structure using AI-driven optimization.
The startup argues that performance marketing has been stuck in a model that scales poorly. Agencies rely heavily on human oversight, which means more clients require more people. Automation flips that equation. One platform can manage hundreds of campaigns simultaneously while constantly learning from performance signals.
For smaller businesses, that matters. Many of them cannot afford agency retainers but still want professional campaign optimization.
Early traction that caught investor attention
The company’s early numbers help explain why investors leaned in quickly.
Within its first year, Aizy reported €2 million in annual recurring revenue and a client base of more than 150 organizations spanning retail, e-commerce, and automotive sectors.
That growth is unusually fast in SaaS terms. Investors point out that only about three percent of SaaS companies reach €1 million ARR within their first year. Doubling that benchmark in the same period puts Aizy in a very small cohort of early-stage startups.
The latest €2 million investment follows an earlier €1.5 million funding round and will be used to expand the platform internationally and grow engineering capacity.
A bigger shift hiding behind the funding
The deeper story here is not just a new marketing tool. It is the idea that performance marketing itself might be turning into infrastructure.
Nuijten describes the goal as redesigning the economics of the industry. Instead of paying agencies to tweak campaigns manually, businesses subscribe to software that continuously optimizes them in real time.
If that model works at scale, it could reshape how many companies buy marketing services. Agencies would not disappear, but their role would shift toward strategy, creative thinking, and brand building while the repetitive mechanics move to software.
Why CMOs should care
The interesting question is not whether AI can run campaigns. That question is already being answered.
The real question is whether automation will change how marketing services are priced and delivered. If platforms like Aizy succeed, performance marketing may start looking less like a consulting business and more like a subscription product.
And in the long run, that could be a bigger disruption than the funding headline itself.
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