When EJ Cho began his first firm in 2018, he was uncovered to what it takes to market a product. He was stunned to discover a market stuffed with completely different single-use instruments.
“It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho instructed TechCrunch. “I had to learn and juggle all these different tools. It felt like a very inefficient way of getting your word out to users. I’ve always been fascinated about how to make marketing a bit more efficient and effective.”
Cho (pictured above on the left) sat on this concept for just a few years whereas engaged on engineering groups at corporations equivalent to Meta, Affirm, and Quick. After the developments in generative AI in 2022, he realized he may have the ability to remedy the advertising and marketing issues he had years earlier utilizing AI.
The consequence was Tofu, an AI-driven B2B advertising and marketing platform that’s designed to carry all of an organization’s potential advertising and marketing campaigns into one house. The platform integrates with a advertising and marketing workforce’s current workflow, and instruments like HubSpot and Salesforce, and makes use of AI to routinely modify advertising and marketing copy for various advertising and marketing channels and might personalize advertising and marketing content material for various buyer varieties.
Cho, Tofu co-founder and CEO, stated that whereas he bumped into his frustrations with advertising and marketing instruments whereas constructing a consumer-facing firm, he determined to give attention to B2B advertising and marketing as a result of it’s considerably extra textual content heavy than B2C advertising and marketing, which made it a extra pure selection for a generative AI method.
Tofu’s workforce consulted greater than 40 completely different CMOs earlier than writing any code, Cho stated, to determine what their largest ache factors had been. The 2 areas that got here up most persistently had been that CMOs wished to have the ability to personalize content material throughout completely different market segments and to repurpose content material for various channels. Cho stated that’s the place Tofu centered first.
“If you really think about it, there’s not that much delta between what you want to write for maybe an email versus what’s for a landing page copy,” Cho stated. “Obviously there’s these small nuances, but it’s nothing that cannot be embedded under one tool.”
San Francisco-based Tofu launched in late 2023 and has seen sturdy demand. The corporate boasts 12x income progress, though it’s value noting that it’s solely been in operation for a bit over a 12 months. Clients embody DeepScribe, Examine Level, and Wunderkind, amongst others.
The corporate is saying a $12 million Sequence A spherical led by SignalFire with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Correlation Ventures, amongst plenty of current VC buyers and angel buyers.
Utilizing AI in advertising and marketing just isn’t essentially a brand new idea — nor a post-ChatGPT idea, both. Jasper, which helps enterprise corporations with AI-driven advertising and marketing, has been round for a decade and is valued at greater than $1.5 billion. Cordial, one other cross-channel advertising and marketing platform, has raised greater than $70 million in enterprise funding.
Cho acknowledged that the house is crowded however added that he thinks Tofu is in an excellent place as a result of it touches so many various groups inside a advertising and marketing division, in comparison with a single-use device. That makes it stickier than a few of Tofu’s different opponents, he stated. The truth that Tofu isn’t only a ChatGPT wrapper and affords an built-in end-to-end answer makes them stand out, he added.
Now that Tofu has closed its Sequence A spherical, the corporate goes develop the product’s capabilities as it really works towards constructing a supply of reality for advertising and marketing groups.
“It is a noisy space,” Cho stated. “The way we position ourselves is to basically say we replace and can support the multiple use cases you’re purchasing individual tools for with one platform. So that unified platform is a very appealing value proposition for customers, especially enterprise customers.”
