Melbourne-founded Cuttable has relaunched as an AI ad platform that doesn’t just churn out creative. It tells brands which ad to run next, built from the asset stack they already own: past results, catalogue data and approved creative.
The relaunch is backed by A$20 million in Series A funding led by Airtree Ventures, with Square Peg returning and Rampersand and Glitch Capital joining. Cuttable spun out of Melbourne agency Sunday Gravy in 2024 and now works with more than 440 ecommerce brands, including lululemon, Cotton On, July, Kathmandu and Conserving Beauty.
The problem: creative volume is not creative learning
Cuttable’s own analysis of over 280,000 ads and US$260 million in Meta spend by 680 ecommerce brands found a brutal baseline: it takes roughly 42 ads to find one that meaningfully moves the business. Just 1 per cent of ads earned half of all attributed revenue. Nearly half lost money, more than a third earned nothing, and the median ad stopped receiving meaningful spend within about two weeks.
At the same time, brands launch 3.4 times as many ads a day in November as in October leading into Black Friday, while the cost of a click has climbed 35 per cent over six quarters. Click-through rates dropped 22 per cent. More pressure, more waste.
How the new platform closes the loop
Most AI tools start from a prompt. Cuttable starts from the brand’s own performance. The platform works in three steps:
- Predict what’s next: AI reads results across connected channels and recommends which ads to make next.
- Build at volume: Creative is cut from the brand’s own photos and footage, in every format, ready to edit and approve.
- Optimise automatically: Ads publish straight to Meta or TikTok, and fresh results feed the next round.
That third step is the shift, co-founder Sam Kroonenburg says: “Everyone has taught AI to make ads. Almost nobody has taught the ads to learn.” Every ad a brand runs, he argues, is a data point about its customers—but teams usually switch it off and start from scratch.
Cuttable’s system holds onto what each ad learned. It draws performance data from Meta and TikTok, catalogue and stock signals from Shopify, and inputs from tools including Klaviyo, ProfitPeak, Triple Whale, North Beam and Motion. A product about to sell out gets different messaging to one the business needs to move.
Why it matters for performance teams
The pitch is simple: stop losing the lessons in every paused ad. Brands moving to Cuttable average a 4.4 times return on ad spend, with campaigns live in a day instead of two to three weeks.
The funding will grow Cuttable’s teams in Melbourne, New York and San Francisco and build out the platform just before Black Friday on 27 November. Kroonenburg, who sold cloud training company A Cloud Guru for more than US$2 billion in 2021, is betting that the winning AI ad tools will be the ones that learn, not just generate.
For marketers, the takeaway is less about a specific vendor and more about a mindset: if your ad workflow creates 42 variations to find one winner, you need a system that captures why that one worked.
Source: Campaign Brief
