Why We Backed Stardust: The Future of Marketing Is Evolutionary

Billions are spent on digital ads every day, yet most marketers are still guessing why people actually buy.

Swedish startup Stardust is ending that guesswork. Their AI analyzes every frame, every word, and every pixel in an ad to uncover what truly persuades people to act. It’s not about what converts, it’s about why it converts. And that question marks the birth of an entirely new category: Evolution Marketing.

We’re proud to lead Stardust’s €1.7M pre-seed round, alongside Anton Osika (Lovable), Jonas Dhaenens (Team.Blue) and SSE Ventures.

From hackathon to paradigm shift

Only six months ago, the Stardust team won Lovable’s global AI hackathon out of 2,000 competing teams. Today, they’re redefining creative decision-making. At the heart of Stardust lies a simple but radical idea: marketing shouldn’t be driven by dashboards, but by self-improving loops. Their AI doesn’t just report results, it learns from them. It studies what makes people click, buy, and engage, then uses those insights to write, design, and optimize new ads autonomously.Every successful campaign makes the next one smarter.

That’s Evolution Marketing: a system that continuously improves itself, compounding creativity and performance.

Why we invested

At Pitchdrive, we back founders who don’t just automate existing processes - they reinvent how work gets done. Rasmus Sanne and the Stardust team are doing exactly that.

“They’re not automating the status quo; they’re designing entirely new ways of working where creativity, collaboration, and productivity blend seamlessly through intelligent systems. It’s a bold vision - and exactly the kind of pioneering energy we love to back.” - Koen Christiaens, Founding Partner at Pitchdrive

With this round, Stardust is ready to turn its breakthrough AI into a global creative engine - one that helps brands understand, evolve, and outperform. Because the future of marketing won’t be governed by dashboards. It will be shaped by self-learning systems - and Stardust is already building that future.