A Raleigh startup focusing on artificial intelligence has announced a $7.5 million funding round.
Aampe is developing what it describes as an AI-native user engagement platform. The goal is to turn an app’s marketing messaging into a personalized experience through AI that can track and adapt to a user's responses. Marketers can then collect the data to better understand their users.
CEO Paul Meinshausen, who is based in Singapore, cofounded the company alongside Raleigh technologist Schaun Wheeler, a veteran of MaxPoint Interactive. Both continue to be majority owners following the fundraise, which was led by Matrix Partners India and Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA).
The latest tranche brings the firm’s total outside capital haul to $9.3 million since its founding in 2020.
Meinshausen has spent a decade building consumer apps, such asPaySense, a fintech that sold for $185 million in 2019. But his relationship with Wheeler goes back further – both were involved with a civilian data science team with the U.S. Department of the Army that ran models to understand outcomes of the conflict in Afghanistan.
When Meinshausen started to play around with the idea, he reached out to his old colleague who, at that point, was living in Raleigh, having moved here to work at MaxPoint.
“As we looked more into it, the geeky data scientist in me started getting really excited,” Wheeler said.
Right now, the team is at 15 people, all of whom have equity in the company.
The new funding will help expand the technology’s capabilities, but it will also go toward investments in engineers.
The company, which has more than 50 million users each month, is technically headquartered in Raleigh, but is fully remote. Meinshausen said that instead of paying overhead cost for an office, the firm can reallocate those dollars for travel so team members can meet regularly.
Meinshausen declined to talk about the company’s current valuation, but said it is “well capitalized in the sense that we have plenty of runway.”