When EJ Cho began his first firm in 2018, he was uncovered to what it takes to market a product. He was shocked to discover a market crammed with completely different single-use instruments.
“It was a really irritating expertise,” Cho advised TechCrunch. “I needed to be taught and juggle all these completely different instruments. It felt like a really inefficient manner of getting your phrase out to customers. I’ve at all times been fascinated about how one can make advertising and marketing a bit extra environment friendly and efficient.”
Cho (pictured above on the left) sat on this concept for a number of years whereas engaged on engineering groups at corporations similar to Meta, Affirm, and Quick. After the developments in generative AI in 2022, he realized he would possibly have the ability to resolve the advertising and marketing issues he had years earlier utilizing AI.
The end result 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 area. The platform integrates with a advertising and marketing group’s current workflow, and instruments like HubSpot and Salesforce, and makes use of AI to mechanically modify advertising and marketing copy for various advertising and marketing channels and may personalize advertising and marketing content material for various buyer sorts.
Cho, Tofu co-founder and CEO, mentioned that whereas he bumped into his frustrations with advertising and marketing instruments whereas constructing a consumer-facing firm, he determined to deal with 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 alternative for a generative AI method.
Tofu’s group consulted greater than 40 completely different CMOs earlier than writing any code, Cho mentioned, to determine what their largest ache factors have been. The 2 areas that got here up most persistently have 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 mentioned that’s the place Tofu targeted first.
“Should you actually give it some thought, there’s not that a lot delta between what you wish to write for possibly an e mail versus what’s for a touchdown web page copy,” Cho mentioned. “Clearly there’s these small nuances, but it surely’s nothing that can’t be embedded below one software.”
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 somewhat over a yr. Clients embrace DeepScribe, Verify Level, and Wunderkind, amongst others.
The corporate is saying a $12 million Collection A spherical led by SignalFire with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Correlation Ventures, amongst quite a few current VC buyers and angel buyers.
Utilizing AI in advertising and marketing 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 area is crowded however added that he thinks Tofu is in a very good place as a result of it touches so many various groups inside a advertising and marketing division, in comparison with a single-use software. That makes it stickier than a few of Tofu’s different opponents, he mentioned. The truth that Tofu isn’t only a ChatGPT wrapper and gives an built-in end-to-end answer makes them stand out, he added.
Now that Tofu has closed its Collection A spherical, the corporate goes broaden the product’s capabilities as it really works towards constructing a supply of reality for advertising and marketing groups.
“It’s a noisy area,” Cho mentioned. “The best way we place ourselves is to mainly say we change and may assist the a number of use circumstances you’re buying particular person instruments for with one platform. In order that unified platform is a really interesting worth proposition for patrons, particularly enterprise prospects.”