Turning ad creative into a feedback-driven system, starting with interactive ads
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — San Francisco–based startup GIGR (dba. Playad) today announced it has raised $5.4 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the development of AI marketing agents that help teams create, test, and improve advertising creative with less manual work and less guesswork.
The round was led by BRV Capital Management and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with participation from angel investors including Bora Chung (board member at Krafton and former executive at Bill.com), Jihun Yu (founder of Hyprsense, acquired by Epic Games), and Krew Capital.
From one-off assets to a workflow that learns
Even with modern tooling, producing effective ad creative is still slow, fragmented, and expensive. Teams move from briefs to handoffs to revisions, then stitch together performance insights after the fact – often without a clear path to what to build next. GIGR’s view is that the next leap in marketing won’t come from yet another tool. It will come from an AI-native workflow that turns performance signals into faster iteration – so creatives improve with every cycle.
That is what GIGR is building: a multi-agent marketing workflow designed to support the full creative lifecycle – briefing, production, experimentation, measurement, and iteration – so teams can run more tests and learn faster.
Why Playad starts with interactive ads
GIGR’s product, Playad (launched 3Q 2025) starts where the signal is strongest: interactive ads. Especially in gaming, these formats are widely used because they often drive higher conversion at lower CPI by letting users experience the product. They also capture granular actions – taps, swipes, and choices – making iteration clearer by showing not just whether a creative worked, but how users engaged. Industry analysis shows playable ad performance reached record highs in 2025, reinforcing the growing effectiveness of interactive formats.
Historically, however, interactive ads have been powerful yet impractical – slow to build, prohibitively expensive, and dependent on specialized developers. Playad makes them fast enough to iterate and simple enough for marketers to own, which changes creative from a bottleneck into a repeatable workflow at a fraction of cost. In addition, Playad is designed for rapid experimentation, and teams can A/B test interactive ads by instantly creating a wide range of variations.
While interactive formats are the initial wedge, Playad is built as a broader AI-native creative platform, enabling teams to create and iterate across image, video, and interactive formats within a single system.
“Marketing performance increasingly depends on how quickly teams can learn from creative – and act on it,” said Steve Chung, co-founder of GIGR. “We’re building AI agents that make iteration the default, so teams can quickly apply what’s already working across the market to their next creative without sacrificing quality.”
Customers feel the difference in speed and in confidence
Customers adopt Playad for speed, but what keeps them coming back is the workflow: teams can ship iterations faster, run more experiments, and tighten the loop between creation and performance.
In practice, customers have reported meaningful outcomes, including major reductions in production cost – as much as 90% in some cases – alongside measurable improvements in acquisition efficiency.
“We’re not trying to simply produce ‘more assets,'” said Jay Cho, CEO and co-founder of GIGR. “We’re building a system where every launch creates learning – and that learning directly improves the next creative decision. Creative is the most important lever for improving ROAS in modern marketing, and we are going beyond just efficiency gains to help businesses eliminate uncertainty across their decisions when it comes to digital advertising.
Team
GIGR’s founding team brings experience across high-growth startups and global technology companies, united by a single obsession: removing the bottleneck between creative iteration and ad performance.
What sets the team apart is its seven-founder structure. GIGR was built by long-time collaborators who chose to start together – each owning a distinct problem space, and all committed to rebuilding broken marketing workflows.
- Jay Jaeyeon Cho (Co-founder, CEO) previously headed the AI game studios at Bagelcode, playing a key role in the company’s growth to 50M+ users and approximately $70M in annual revenue. He brings a product-first view of growth at the intersection of games, AI, and performance marketing.
- Steve Nam Hyuk Chung (Co-founder, Business) has over a decade of experience across investment banking, strategy, and business development, including roles at Bank of America, PlayStation, YouTube, and 20th Century Fox. Educated at MIT and Wharton, he focuses on turning creative insight into repeatable business systems.
- Jayden Hyun Jae Park (Co-founder, Engineering) has led engineering teams building production-grade systems, including as a tech lead at Devsisters, with deep experience scaling AI-driven products from early prototypes to real-world usage.
- The remaining founders – Simon, Arthur, Daniel, and Youn – bring deep technical rigor and a competitive builder’s mindset, shaped by top-tier engineering training at Stanford and POSTECH and years of high-intensity problem solving.
About GIGR (Playad.ai)
GIGR is building a multi-agent AI platform for marketing, starting with an AI-native creative workflow that makes interactive ads practical – while enabling iteration across image, video, and interactive formats in one system. Learn more at https://playad.ai.
SOURCE GIGR