Affable

Affable (affable.ai) was a Singapore-based marketing technology company operating an end-to-end, AI-driven influencer marketing platform for brands and agencies. The platform covered the planning, discovery, activation and reporting phases of influencer campaigns, providing real-time influencer and audience analytics, fraud detection and performance measurement. Its algorithms were built in-house and crawled the social web daily, so influencer profiles were compiled without requiring creators to opt into a database. As of 2021 the company said it tracked more than three million influencers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.

Functionally, the product combined a discovery engine with demographic and psychographic search filters (follower counts, topics, mentions, audience traits, locations, suspicious followers), negative filters that exclude creators matching unwanted criteria such as prior mentions of a competitor, look-alike search, and grouping features that report a group's unique reach after deduplicating overlapping audiences. Campaign management features included an influencer CRM for bulk outreach, automatic capture of campaign content including Instagram Stories, affiliate code and link tracking, direct payments and commissions to influencers, data export to CSV and PowerPoint, and integrations with sales-tracking software. A Shopify app published by Affable Technologies Pte. Ltd. extended these capabilities to e-commerce merchants.

Following the October 2023 acquisition, the affable.ai domain redirects to Bazaarvoice's Vibe Creator Marketing offering, which markets four modules — creator discovery (20+ filters plus generative-AI search using text, mood boards, conversational chat and look-alike recommendations), collaboration management, campaign tracking and performance measurement.

Founding story

Affable was founded in 2017 by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain as part of an Entrepreneur First cohort in Singapore. Shah has described the founding belief as the future of commerce being social-led, with creators and influencers helping brands scale reach through trusted voices.

Business model

Affable sold an AI-driven, self-service SaaS influencer marketing platform to brands and agencies, offered in three service tiers (SME, Pro and Enterprise) whose prices were not published and required a quote. Tiers were differentiated by number of user accounts, number of concurrent active campaigns, search limits, monthly influencer analytics quotas (50, 200 and 400 respectively), data export, influencer CRM, channel coverage, Instagram Story tracking, white-labelled reports, dedicated account management and onboarding/offline support. A free companion app was also distributed through the Shopify App Store for e-commerce merchants.

Subscription software sold in three quote-based tiers (SME, Pro, Enterprise) with usage limits on campaigns, searches and monthly influencer analytics; the Shopify listing was free.

Traction

By May 2021 the platform was used by over 45 brands and agencies, tracked more than three million influencers across four social networks, and the company employed about 20 people. Publicly named customers spanned regional and global brands. Total disclosed funding reached $2.8 million before the 2023 acquisition by Bazaarvoice.

Latest developments

On 10 October 2023 Bazaarvoice announced the acquisition of the affable.ai platform from Affable Technologies, positioning it as part of an integrated creator platform combining creator discovery and management with Bazaarvoice's existing creator-managed services, social commerce and content activation solutions and retail syndication network. Bazaarvoice CEO Keith Nealon cited projections that the creator economy would double to $480 billion by 2027. The affable.ai web address now presents Bazaarvoice's Vibe Creator Marketing product.