When EJ Cho started his first company in 2018, he was exposed to what he needed to sell his products. He was surprised to find a market filled with a variety of disposable tools.
“It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho told TechCrunch. “I had to learn and juggle all these different tools. It felt like a very inefficient way to communicate your words to the users. I always do my marketing a little more efficient and I’ve been fascinated by the way it works.”
Cho (pictured above left) sat on the idea for several years while working on engineering teams for companies such as Meta, Affirm and Fast. After advances in generation AI in 2022, he realized that he could potentially solve the marketing problems he had been using AI many years ago.
The result is Tofu, an AI-driven B2B marketing platform, which is designed to bring potential marketing campaigns for all companies into one space. The platform integrates with existing workflows for marketing teams, as well as tools such as Hubspot and Salesforce, and uses AI to automatically change marketing copies of different marketing channels, allowing users to use different customer types to create a wide range of customer types. Personalize your marketing content.
Cho, co-founder and CEO of Tofu, said he decided to focus on B2B marketing while he was unhappy with marketing tools while building a consumer-oriented company. A more natural choice of a generator AI approach.
The tofu team consulted over 40 different CMOs before writing the code, Cho said to figure out what their biggest problem was. The two areas that emerged most consistently were that CMOS wanted to personalize content across different market segments and allow content from different channels to be reused. Cho said that tofu was the first place to focus.
“If you really think about it, there aren’t that many deltas, probably because of what you want to write for the email and the copy of the landing page,” Cho said. “There are obviously these little nuances, but there’s nothing that can’t be embedded under one tool.”
San Francisco-based tofu was launched in late 2023 and is in strong demand. The company boasts 12x revenue growth rate, but it is worth noting that it has only been in operation for more than a year. Customers include DeepScribe, Check Point, and Wunderkind.
With participation from Hubspot Ventures, Tau Ventures and Correlation Ventures, the company is launching a $12 million Series A round led by SignalFire among many existing VC and angel investors.
Using AI in marketing is not necessarily a new concept, nor is it a post-chat concept. Jasper, which supports AI-led marketing companies, has been around for 10 years and is valued at over $1.5 billion. Another cross-channel marketing platform, Cordial, has raised more than $70 million in venture capital.
Cho admitted that the space is busy, but he believes that tofu is in a good position as it touches so many different teams within the marketing department compared to one-legged tools. I added. It’s more sticky than other tofu competitors, he said. The fact that tofu is not just a ChatGpt rapper, but offers an integrated, end-to-end solution, he added.
Now that Tofu has closed its Series A round, the company is expanding its product capabilities as it functions to build a source of truth for its marketing team.
“It’s a noisy space,” Cho said. “The way we position ourselves is basically saying that we can support multiple use cases where we exchange and purchase individual tools on one platform. So, that unified The platform is a very attractive value proposition for customers, especially the companies’ customers.”
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