Plannuh, a Boston startup behind an AI-enabled, permissions-based platform for marketing teams, has brought in a $4 million seed round co-led by Glasswing Ventures and Google's AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund.
That adds to $2.6 million in convertible notes that Plannuh had previously raised, bringing the startup's total funding to $6.6 million to date.
For founder and CEO Peter Mahoney, Plannuh—"it's sort of like you're saying 'planner' with a Boston accent," he says—is hardly his first rodeo. He was previously chief marketing officer at Nuance Communications, the Burlington-based AI company.
"I alway struggled with planning and budgeting—it was a total nightmare to me," Mahoney said. "The idea came from me being at the center of AI technology in Nuance, driving the function of marketing, and being frustrated that there weren't better tools to make bigger strategic decisions around where to put your money."
Plannuh's solution is to streamline marketing processes into a single, cloud-based platform. It's designed to bring marketing plans, budgets and expense tracking under one roof, where all team members can see it, and make recommendations to maximize returns on investment.
Mahoney left Nuance in March 2017 to start Plannuh. By 2018, he and his team had built a beta version of the platform, and in 2019, Plannuh began selling the product commercially. Plannuh claims that it saves customers between 4 and 24 percent of their overall annual marketing budget—money that "was previously lost due to poor tracking," the company said in a statement.
Today, Plannuh has a team of 16 people, half based in Boston and half in Ukraine. ("My technical team has great long-term experience working with Ukrainian engineers," Mahoney said.) The startup will use the seed round, in part, to hire locally: Mahoney said he will hire five to 10 Boston-based employees in technical roles, customer support, marketing and sales this year.
The new funding will also be used to accelerate Plannuh's R&D initiatives and support teams as the company continues to expand its customer base.
Plannuh's executives, as well as its new investors, paint the startup as well-positioned to take advantage of the growing opportunities for enterprise AI companies. One report published in November estimated the market would be worth more than $53 billion by 2026. And Boston is certainly home to some major enterprise AI startups: Newly minted unicorn DataRobot, for one, along with companies like Affectiva and RapidMiner.
"The intersection of AI, marketing and customer intelligence is a heated battleground," Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner at Glasswing Ventures, said in a statement.
Despite that, Seseri said she thinks Plannuh is "poised to win the battle"—and Mahoney agrees. He believes his years at Nuance (plus years spent in high-level marketing positions before that) give him a leg up. Plannuh chief technology officer Dan Faulkner also spent nearly 15 years at Nuance, serving as senior vice president and general manager just before leaving to join Plannuh.
"Having many years in this space, I know that there's a huge amount of green field," Mahoney said. "There aren't that many people who have been able to build and deliver really scaled production AI applications. We think we're in a pretty good place. We're not too worried about competitive factors."
