A Boston-based startup wants to displace online advertising with its approach to targeted email outreach for B2C companies.
Customers.ai helps companies search and directly connect with potential customers based on demographic information, such as the causes they support, their household income or their religion.
“Businesses sell to customers that meet a certain demographic profile and we can provide them with that data,” said Customers.ai founder and CEO Larry Kim.
Today Customers.ai announced the close of a $4.99M Series A funding round led by ScOp Venture Capital with participation from New York Angels and Beyond Angels. Kevin O’Connor, managing partner at ScOp Venture Capital, is joining Customers.ai’s board.
O’Connor was the founder of DoubleClick, the online advertising company that was bought by Google in 2007 for $3.1 billion.
“Customers.ai’s go-to-market tools are so effective and simple to use that we see it disrupting digital marketing,” O’Connor said in a statement. “Sophisticated targeting technology and AI represents the future of B2C customer acquisition.”
Wordstream founder
Kim already has experience scaling a company. He founded WordStream in his basement in 2007 and grew the company to over 300 employees. WordStream provided software and services to help marketers maximize results from their online marketing efforts. Kim led the company until a few months before it was acquired for $150M in 2018 by USA Today parent company Gannett.
He went on to found Customers.ai, which was initially called MobileMonkey. Kim said they first focused on chatbots, but for the last two years have shifted to focus on sales outreach.
Kim said Customers.ai allows companies to replace things like Facebook and Google ads with more targeted sales outreach to customers. In addition to helping companies target specific customer demographics, Customers.ai also helps with outreach messaging.
Kim said the company uses ChatGPT to “weave the data that we have about the people into interesting outreaches.”
Customers.ai has around 40 employees and over a thousand customers, Kim said. The company targets a diverse range of B2C companies, from the travel to finance to real estate industries.
This new funding will help Customers.ai’s go-to-market efforts, including scaling its team. Kim said they are hiring in all departments and plan to triple the sales team by the end of 2023 to about 20 people.
“We think this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity to popularize the use of tried and true sales outreach tactics and tools, but leveraging that in a B2C context, which hasn’t been done,” Kim said.
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