Founded five years ago by 2 UC Berkeley Dropout, AI-powered marketing automation startup conversion, has raised a $28 million Series A led by the Summary, with participation from True Ventures and HOF Capital.
The company’s founding story sounds like it was an episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley.”
The story begins all the way around co-founder and CEO Neil Tewari (now 24) in high school. He was arrested one day during class after a high-tech crunch confused the live stream and was sent to the principal’s office and had to be late.
Fearing to call his parents and tell them why they had to pick him up, he instead called one of their close friends. Upon getting home, Tewari explained to her friend what was causing her trouble. “I told him I had this interest. [in entrepreneurship]and four years later, he was actually the first person to write a check for the company,” Tewari told TechCrunch.
James Ziao, a university roommate at Tewari in Berkeley, is currently a co-founder and CTO of Conversion, and dreamed of establishing his own company, so the two built a variety of products to help marketers buy product placement ads. They stumbled over the idea of conversion when they decided to sign up for Hubspot to assist with marketing tasks and build some additional automation features that layer on top of it.
“It was originally for us,” Tewari said of his startup technology. The co-founder had so much fun building internal marketing tools that he wondered if he could sell it, and began reaching out to marketing executives for a “customer discovery” interview.
“In fact, we did 160 customer interviews with VPSs from 50-500 companies, like two months, and got a more positive response than we could have imagined,” Tewari said.
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The marketing team had these tools embedded deep in their workflows, but everyone had similar complaints about parts that could not be automated.
The duo found their ideas. Family friends helped to showcase more marketing executives and raise a $2 million seed round. At age 19, they dropped out of college and worked full-time on conversion.
The founder treated the raised funds very modestly and lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. Two people are in the room along with five other roommates.
As they built their products, ChatGpt exploded into the scene. Many legacy marketing automation tools add a variety of AI and chat integrations to their products, but not all features support these integrations. The marketing team said, “We wanted to be able to enrich our contacts. [be] For example, you can automate your workflows,” Tewari said. Conversion burned AI. This means you can organize your leads and automate personalized follow-up emails.
The company’s outlook has also skyrocketed as AI interest has surged. Tewari said conversion has approached a $10 million ARR over the past two years, with about 90% of its customers pulling legacy apps.
Of course, conversions are also present in busy areas. In addition to legacy marketing automation tools such as Hubspot, Adobe Marketo, and Salesforce Pardot, there are AI native startups such as Jasper, Writer AI, Iterable, and Copy.ai.
But Tewari also has the confidence of the classic Silicon Valley of the founder of the busy market. His game plan requires targeting businesses that use old marketing tools. For example, the conversion is not targeting startups that select the tool for the first time.
The company has raised a total of $30 million between Seed and Series A, and according to the CEO, each founder has moved to another apartment with their own room, doing enough to keep their roommates sleeping in the closet.
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