Who Owns Zeely?

Zeely was founded in Ukraine in 2022 by three people who had spent years doing digital marketing and content work for small business clients. The founding insight was that small business owners wanted more sales but were lost inside complex ad accounts, boost buttons, and unclear reporting.

The first product was a mobile app designed around a single question: could a small business owner launch a real, measurable advertising campaign from a phone in under ten minutes and understand the result. The app generated a web store, produced ad creative and copy, and let the user promote across social platforms without design skills or an agency.

Zeely gained early visibility in late 2022 when it was selected as a Top 3 startup at Slush, the major European startup conference, out of roughly 1,200 competing teams. In April 2023 it closed a $1 million seed round led by a group of Ukrainian and regional investors, funding planned TikTok integrations, payment systems, and expanded AI capabilities. At that point its users were concentrated in the US, UK, Brazil, and Mexico, mostly service businesses like beauty, car detailing, coaching, and home care.

The product evolved from a web store builder with promotion tools into what the company now describes as an AI Marketing Intelligence Platform. Creatives are built on performance marketing frameworks covering offer, hook, structure, angle, and call-to-action logic, then launched directly into paid campaigns, currently centered on Meta Ads. Performance data feeds back in, and the platform automatically scales the winning creatives.

By 2026 the team had grown to more than 200 specialists across performance marketing, AI and machine learning, engineering, and creative, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, with operating teams in Kyiv and Warsaw. The company reports more than 1 million users and continues to target the US as its primary market.