An operator and an engineer, building together.
Two complementary obsessions — the brand side and the systems side — compounded into one product.
Sebastian launched on TikTok Shop the week it went live in 2023. He built and scaled multiple six-figure brands on the platform, recruited thousands of affiliates by hand, and learned firsthand every workflow that breaks when affiliate programs scale. That hands-on experience became the blueprint for Cruva.
Samuel studied computer science at UCLA and built large-scale data and ML infrastructure at NASA JPL, earning an award for his research on the Mars rover. He now architects the platform powering Cruva, ingesting millions of creator signals a day and turning them into AI workflows brands can actually trust in production.
From an empty spreadsheet to 1,500+ brands.
In 2023, Sebastian was one of the first sellers on TikTok Shop in the US. He scaled multiple brands to six figures by personally messaging thousands of creators, tracking samples in messy spreadsheets, and stitching together five different tools to do work that should have been one click.
He kept hearing the same story from every other brand on the platform — great products, no system. Affiliate outreach was a nights-and-weekends job, sample requests went into a void, and nobody could tell which creators actually drove repeat GMV.
In mid-2024, Sebastian teamed up with Samuel — an engineer who had spent his career building large-scale data and AI systems — and the two of them shipped the first version of Cruva. The pitch was simple: take every painful step of running a TikTok Shop affiliate program and turn it into one platform that brands could run with a small team.
Today Cruva powers affiliate programs for more than 1,500 brands— from indie founders to category leaders. We’ve grown roughly 10× year over year, shipped weekly without a single missed release, and stayed laser-focused on one platform while everyone else chases breadth.
We’re still day one. TikTok Shop is reshaping how the next generation discovers and buys products — and Cruva is the system the brands building on top of it run on.
What we believe.
Every workflow in Cruva exists because we hit the wall ourselves. We sell what we wish we had at 2am, not what looks good in a pitch.
We use AI to remove busywork — sourcing, personalizing, prioritizing — not to generate noise. If a feature doesn't make your team measurably faster, it doesn't ship.
We're unapologetically built for the brand side. That focus is how we ship workflows that actually move GMV instead of generic CRM features bolted onto a creator search.
TikTok Shop evolves weekly. We ship weekly. Customers get the new platform mechanics — viral content, sample rules, live shopping — wired into Cruva before their competitors learn the rules changed.