{"slug": "nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird", "title": "Nest Commerce Wins TikTok Grant To Build AI Creative Platform Hummingbird", "summary": "TikTok awarded a technology grant to UK performance and creative agency Nest Commerce to launch Hummingbird, an AI creative and performance platform built specifically for TikTok, announced on TikTok's business blog with a launch at TikTok's London headquarters on 23 September. Nest Commerce, which works with brands including Urban Outfitters, Hims and Damson Madder, reported that across its TikTok campaigns CPMs fell 31% year on year, spend rose 38%, and cost per acquisition dropped 10%. Kris Boger, General Manager, Business Solutions UK, Ireland and Benelux at TikTok, said \"The opportunity for AI isn't to replace creativity, it's to help great creative teams learn faster, experiment more and turn those insights into better work.", "body_md": "*Nest Commerce built the technology its biggest client now runs on, and TikTok paid to help make it happen.*\n\nUK performance and creative agency Nest Commerce has been awarded a technology grant from TikTok to launch Hummingbird, an AI creative and performance platform developed specifically for the platform. The partnership was announced on TikTok's business blog, with the launch landing at TikTok's London headquarters on 23 September.\n\nNest Commerce works with brands including Urban Outfitters, Hims and Damson Madder, and built [Hummingbird AI | Creative + Performance In One Platform](https://nestcommerce.co/solutions/) to address a problem familiar to anyone running ads on TikTok: creative burns out fast, and keeping pace with shifting culture and audience behaviour is a constant grind for brand teams.\n\n## How Hummingbird works\n\nThe platform analyses a brand's live advertising performance in real time, identifying which creative elements are resonating with audiences and feeding those insights into the next round of assets. It produces creative variations across static, motion and UGC-style formats, and monitors live campaigns for early signs of creative fatigue before performance drops off.\n\nNest's creative team stays central to the process. Hummingbird is built to increase the speed and scale at which teams can test, learn and create, not to remove human judgment from the loop.\n\n[OpenAI Shuts Down Sora's API This Week, Ending Its Billion Dollar Disney Deal](https://startupfortune.com/openai-shuts-down-soras-api-this-week-ending-its-billion-dollar-disney-deal/)\n\nOpenAI's Sora video API shuts down for good on September 24, 2026, just days after the news broke. The shutdown, which reportedly saved OpenAI roughly $1 million a day in compute costs, also killed a $1 billion Disney licensing deal that let Sora users generate clips with Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. - [why is OpenAI shutting down Sora API](https://startupfortune.com/openai-shuts-down-soras-api-this-week-ending-its-billion-dollar-disney-deal/) - [what happened to OpenAI Sora video generator](https://startupfortune.com/openai-shuts-down-soras-api-this-week-ending-its-billion-dollar-disney-deal/)\n\nThe case for the approach is already visible in Nest's own portfolio data. Across its TikTok campaigns, CPMs fell 31% year on year, spend rose 38%, and cost per acquisition dropped 10%, numbers that point to creative as one of the more direct levers brands have on TikTok performance right now.\n\n## Why TikTok backed it\n\nKris Boger, General Manager, Business Solutions UK, Ireland and Benelux at TikTok, said creative is one of the biggest drivers of performance on the platform, but that the real challenge for brands is keeping pace with how quickly culture and audiences move. \"The opportunity for AI isn't to replace creativity, it's to help great creative teams learn faster, experiment more and turn those insights into better work,\" Boger said. \"That's what we saw in Hummingbird. Nest has combined technology with real creative and performance expertise, with people firmly in control of the process. It's exactly the kind of innovation we want to encourage on TikTok, which is why we backed its development and are excited to launch it with Nest at our London headquarters.\"\n\nWill Ashton, CEO and co-founder of Nest Commerce, framed the grant as validation of the direction the agency has taken. \"Winning this direct funding from TikTok for tech innovation is a huge endorsement of the direction we have taken,\" Ashton said. \"TikTok gives brands an incredible opportunity to learn quickly from creative and turn those insights into growth. We built Hummingbird to help teams do that at greater speed and scale, understanding what's resonating, using those signals to shape the next round of creative, and keeping expert judgement at the heart of every decision.\"\n\nThe arrangement flips the usual agency-platform relationship: rather than simply buying media on TikTok, Nest is now one of the tools TikTok itself is funding to make that media work harder. For brands watching CPMs and creative fatigue closely, Hummingbird's 23 September launch gives an early look at what that funding produced. More on Nest Commerce is available at their site, nestcommerce.co.\n\n## Join the discussion\n\n[Open in the community →](https://startupfortune.com/community/)\n\nAlmost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird/", "published_at": "2026-09-21 12:38:24+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-21 12:55:24.512494+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Nest Commerce", "TikTok", "Hummingbird", "Kris Boger", "Will Ashton", "Urban Outfitters", "Hims", "Damson Madder"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nest-commerce-wins-tiktok-grant-to-build-ai-creative-platform-hummingbird.jsonld"}}