Influential Went From a Coachella Party to a Reported $500M Publicis Exit: Piotr Tomasik's Influencer Marketing Story

October 12, 2026

TL;DR: Influential is an influencer marketing company that matches brands with social media creators, using its own data platform plus a sales and services team. It was founded in 2013 by Ryan Detert (CEO), Daniel Steele and Piotr Tomasik (CTO), as of an October 2026 web search. Tomasik joined after building an app for a party his future co-founders threw at Coachella in 2014. As he shared on the show, Influential grew from about $2.5 million in revenue in 2014 to the $10 million range by 2017. In July 2024, Publicis Groupe announced it would acquire Influential, in a deal that published reports put at about $500 million; Publicis did not disclose the terms. The one-line story: while most influencer marketplaces chased self-serve brands, Influential sold to ad agencies, where the big budgets were. Tomasik told the story on The Product Market Fit Show, recorded in 2024, shortly after the sale.

What does Influential do?

Influential helps brands run marketing campaigns through creators on social media. A brand or its agency tells Influential who it wants to reach. Influential finds the right creators, helps shape the creative, launches the posts and reports on the results.

Under the hood is a data platform. Tomasik built the first version in 2015. It pulled in every influencer the team knew about, downloaded their posts, and ran them through data partners to work out what each influencer talked about and what their audience cared about. A brand selling to horse lovers could then search for influencers whose audiences had a strong affinity for that topic.

Over time the platform added more early AI tools, including IBM Watson personality matching, knowledge graphs and image recognition. If a brand wanted a celebrity it could not afford, the team could find influencers who looked, talked and drew audiences in a similar way.

Influential was never a pure software company. Tomasik called it a tech-enabled business: a large sales team closed the deals, and the platform did the work behind them. It did sell some SaaS subscriptions to agencies that had their own creator teams.

Key stat: when Pablo asked whether gross margins were closer to 50% than the 80% typical of SaaS, Tomasik agreed, because the team helped with creative and launched each campaign.

As of Publicis Groupe's July 2024 announcement, Influential described itself as the largest influencer marketing company by revenue, with a network of more than 3.5 million creators, data on 90% of global influencers with over 1 million followers, and more than 300 brand clients.

Who founded Influential?

Influential was founded in 2013 by Ryan Detert, Daniel Steele and Piotr Tomasik, as of an October 2026 web search. Detert is the CEO and stayed on to lead the business inside Publicis. Steele served as president and Tomasik as chief technology officer.

Tomasik came in through an unusual door. Detert and Steele were throwing a party at Coachella in 2014 and wanted an app that would get guests posting with the same hashtags so the party would trend.

"And they brought me in to build an app in preparation for that party." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

As he shared on the show, the party became the number one trend in the United States, and worldwide at times. He worked as a consultant first. Detert and Steele liked his speed, and asked him to join as technical co-founder.

After Influential, Tomasik co-founded TensorWave, an AI cloud company built on AMD GPUs, where he is president. As of an October 2026 web search, TensorWave raised a $100 million Series A in May 2025, led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures. Pablo noted on the show that Mistral is an investor in TensorWave.

How much did Influential raise?

All figures below come from an October 2026 web search of press coverage (TechCrunch, SoCalTech and company announcements), except where marked as said on the show.

Seed, 2015: as he shared on the show, the team set out to raise $750,000 and ended up with about $3 million, in a round that stayed open for roughly 11 months. The lead was Europlay Capital Advisors. They also tried an early crowdfunding platform called Flash Funders.
Series A, 2016: $5 million, led by Capital Zed, with ROAR, Paradigm Talent Agency, Europlay Capital Advisors and others. Influential said it had raised $9 million in total at that point. Tomasik said the term sheet came at Thanksgiving 2015 and the round closed around the Super Bowl in February 2016.
Series B, June 2018: $12 million, led by existing investors with new investor WME. That brought total funding to $26.5 million since 2013.

I could not verify any later rounds, so they are left out here.

Key stat: as of the 2018 Series B, Influential had raised $26.5 million in total, per TechCrunch.

Who acquired Influential?

Publicis Groupe, the Paris-based advertising holding company, announced on July 25, 2024 that it would acquire Influential. As of an October 2026 web search:

Price: Publicis did not disclose financial terms. Published reports, including trade press coverage, put the deal at about $500 million. Treat that figure as reported, not confirmed by either company.
Timing: coverage at the time said the deal was expected to close in late August 2024.
Plan: Publicis said it would combine Influential's platform with Epsilon, its data and consumer insights business, so brands can find creators who reach their target customers and plan, manage and measure that spend across social, digital and affiliate marketing.
Leadership: Ryan Detert stayed on as CEO, with Influential placed centrally within Publicis Groupe.

Tomasik called it a strategic deal. Publicis owns a global network of ad agencies, the same buyers Influential had spent a decade selling to. As he shared on the show, it was the third sale process the company had run. Earlier deals fell through for reasons outside Influential's control, which he described as economic factors on the buyer's side. This time a bank ran the process, identified Publicis as the lead bidder, and the deal closed after a few rounds of negotiation.

Key stat: the episode intro, from host Pablo Srugo, puts Influential's revenue at about $150 million. That number was not independently confirmed for this post.

The AdSense business that almost broke them

Before the platform, Influential made money a different way. Celebrities and influencers drove their followers to slideshow websites covered in Google AdSense ads. As he shared on the show, that business did about $1.5 million in revenue.

Then mobile traffic broke it. The ads led to pages that were not built for phones, so people bounced. Google flagged the traffic as invalid and clawed back revenue.

"And you can't really run a business where, you know, you're handing out 70 % of your top line to the people that are driving the traffic and then get your revenue clawed back." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

So they pivoted to ad agencies, packaging influencers and selling posts on impressions, the way agencies already bought billboards and radio. As he shared on the show, that brought in about $1 million in agency revenue in 2014, for roughly $2.5 million total that year. The first big campaign was a $100,000 deal for the Rock in Rio concert in Las Vegas.

It worked, but it was brokering, not tech. That led Tomasik to build the first platform in 2015.

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How an IBM partnership led to product-market fit

The seed round got press. That press led to a cold LinkedIn message from the person running IBM Watson's ecosystem program, who was hunting for use cases for Watson's APIs.

Tomasik picked an API called Personality Insights. Given a body of text, it returned 52 personality traits. His idea: run an influencer's posts and a brand's content through it, and if enough traits overlapped, the influencer's audience would be open to the brand's message. He sent IBM a short white paper. IBM liked it, and Influential became an IBM Watson partner.

"And the reason why I'm diving into that so deeply is, you know, people don't get fired for picking IBM." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

The IBM name in the pitch deck gave a young startup credibility with ad agencies. It helped land Kia North America's 2016 Super Bowl campaign, in which influencers amplified Kia's TV ads. The campaign was featured in the Wall Street Journal, and Tomasik was invited to meet IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. He pointed to that stretch as the moment Influential found product-market fit.

The numbers moved fast after that. As he shared on the show, revenue was close to $3 million in 2015, about $6 million in 2016 and in the $10 million range in 2017.

But Tomasik was clear about where the partnership did not help. IBM's huge sales force never sold Influential's product.

"And so we spent a lot of resources and time creating materials for their sales team to sell our product. And even though they have one of the greatest sales machines in history, especially tech, we didn't see a single dollar out of their sales team." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

His explanation: sellers are paid on what they close, and will not pitch a partner product that does not come up naturally with their clients.

Why Influential won when other influencer marketplaces stalled

Pablo asked why Influential reached this scale when dozens of similar marketplaces plateaued. Tomasik's answer was go-to-market.

"I think we were just laser focused on getting into ad agencies and brands direct." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

Most competitors, he said, built self-serve marketplaces. Those scale better when they work, but they attract brands testing a small campaign and leaving. Agencies hold the steady, large budgets, and they buy through relationships.

"You know, marketing and ad agencies is a relationship business at the end of the day. And you have to be in front of these people that are making the, you know, $10 million decisions, not, you know, the brands that are, I don't know, buying a campaign here or there." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

Influential also made buying easy. Agencies were used to buying impressions, so Influential sold impressions and handled the details behind the scenes.

When feeds turned algorithmic and organic reach dropped, Influential added Optimized Paid Media: paid ads behind an influencer's own posts, aimed at their audience. Margins took a hit, but the reporting gave agencies the data they wanted.

Key lessons from Piotr Tomasik's playbook

1. Sell where the money already sits. Influential won by selling to ad agencies with large, repeat budgets, and by packaging its product in the impression-based terms agencies already used. 2. Use a big partner for credibility, not distribution. The IBM Watson name opened agency doors. IBM's sales force never sold a dollar. Plan for the first, do not count on the second. 3. Services are fine if they drive customer success. Influential ran at roughly 50% gross margins, by Pablo's estimate that Tomasik confirmed, because it helped with creative and launched campaigns. It still reached a large exit. 4. Ship early and watch what customers do. Tomasik's main advice is to get the product in front of customers as early and often as possible, because people are often too polite to give honest answers in surveys. 5. Do not hire your way out of problems. After a raise, solve problems with process and tech first.

"Don't try to solve problems with people. Try to solve your problems, you know, with process and tech, hopefully." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

On life as a paper-rich founder living on a salary, his view is simple.

"My wife and I really believe in taking money off the table when you can because there's a lot more psychological safety in that than putting it all in black, right, and waiting for the end." — Piotr Tomasik, Influential

For more founder stories about creators, marketing and exits, see how Later reached $40M ARR and a $100M exit, Cameo's ride from unicorn to a 90% down round, Perkbox's pivots to a $170M exit, and the capital efficiency metrics that matter.

Listen to the full interview: His influencer marketplace hit $150M in revenue and just exited for $500M. It all started with a party at Coachella.

FAQ: Influential

Q: What is Influential? A: Influential is an influencer marketing company and data platform that matches brands with social media creators, helps build the campaigns, launches them and reports results. As of July 2024 it said it had a network of more than 3.5 million creators and over 300 brand clients.

Q: Who acquired Influential? A: Publicis Groupe announced on July 25, 2024 that it would acquire Influential. Publicis did not disclose the price; published reports put it at about $500 million. Publicis planned to combine Influential with its Epsilon data business.

Q: Who is the CEO of Influential? A: Ryan Detert, who co-founded the company in 2013 with Daniel Steele and Piotr Tomasik, is CEO and stayed on to lead Influential within Publicis Groupe.

Q: How much funding did Influential raise? A: Influential raised a $5 million Series A in 2016 and a $12 million Series B in 2018, for $26.5 million in total as of the Series B. Its seed round, about $3 million per Tomasik on the show, was led by Europlay Capital Advisors.

Q: Who were Influential's investors? A: Investors included Capital Zed, Europlay Capital Advisors, WME, ROAR, Paradigm Talent Agency, ECA Ventures and Tech Coast Angels.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

Piotr Tomasik, Co-Founder of Influential — the technical co-founder who built Influential's matching platform, on the Coachella origin story, the IBM Watson partnership, selling to ad agencies, and life after a reported $500 million sale to Publicis Groupe.