AI Marketing Startup Conversion Secures $28M Series A Funding
AI marketing startup Conversion has successfully closed a $28 million Series A funding round, signaling a significant vote of confidence in its mission to disrupt the traditional marketing automation landscape. The round was led by Abstract Ventures, with notable participation from True Ventures and HOF Capital, bringing Conversion’s total funding to $30 million. This investment underscores the growing appetite for AI-native solutions that promise to streamline and revolutionize marketing operations for businesses.
Founded five years ago by former UC Berkeley students Neil Tewari and James Jiao, Conversion emerged from a homegrown project that initially aimed to enhance existing marketing tools. Tewari, now 24 and serving as CEO, and Jiao, the CTO, developed their platform after identifying significant limitations in legacy systems like HubSpot and Adobe Marketo. Their entrepreneurial journey began with a $2 million seed round and involved extensive customer interviews with over 160 marketing executives, revealing a consistent need for more robust automation and personalization capabilities. This dedication to understanding market pain points has propelled Conversion to nearly $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in less than two years, a testament to its rapid adoption and effectiveness. The company, officially known as Relentlo Inc., serves over 4,000 clients, including high-profile names like OpenAI, Clay, and HockeyStack.
Conversion differentiates itself by being an “AI-native” marketing automation platform, built from the ground up with artificial intelligence at its core, rather than retrofitting AI onto older architectures. This approach allows it to offer a fast, flexible, and highly personalized experience for high-growth B2B businesses. The platform helps companies activate customer data, construct custom marketing journeys, and dispatch highly personalized emails. Its comprehensive suite unifies critical marketing functions such as email campaigns, audience segmentation, lead scoring, workflow automation, and detailed reporting, all designed to act as a company’s growth engine. By leveraging AI, Conversion automates tasks like lead organization and personalized follow-ups, enabling marketing teams to operate with greater efficiency and precision. The company primarily targets midsize businesses, with approximately 90% of its clientele having migrated from older marketing software, indicating a strong market fit for those dissatisfied with existing solutions.
The lead investor, Abstract Ventures, is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with over $1.5 billion in assets under management, known for its focus on early-stage technology companies across various sectors, including enterprise and frontier tech. Their investment in Conversion aligns with their strategy of backing innovative founders who are solving complex problems with transformative technology. True Ventures, a Palo Alto-based firm with over $3.8 billion under management, also participated, bringing its extensive experience in early-stage tech investments, particularly in AI and enterprise software. HOF Capital, a New York-based technology-focused VC firm, joined the round as well, reinforcing the broad investor confidence in Conversion’s potential. The funding will be strategically deployed to accelerate product development, expand the team, and further scale the company’s marketing automation platform.
This funding round comes at a pivotal time for the AI marketing automation industry. The market is projected to reach $47.32 billion by 2025, with an estimated 88% of marketers expected to utilize AI in their operations. AI’s integration into marketing is no longer a nascent trend but a mainstream necessity, driving hyper-personalization, intelligent content creation, real-time customer journey analytics, and enhanced security. Marketers are increasingly relying on AI to deliver tailored experiences, with studies showing AI-powered personalization can lead to significantly higher conversion rates and open rates. Conversion’s success and its ability to attract significant investment highlight a broader industry shift: businesses are actively seeking AI solutions that offer measurable ROI and can replace cumbersome, outdated systems. In a competitive landscape populated by both established giants and a new wave of AI-native startups, Conversion’s lean, engineering-focused team and its clear value proposition position it as a formidable challenger poised to shape the future of marketing automation.