See the 12-slide pitch deck AI marketing-tech startup Octave used to raise a $5.5 million seed round from Bonfire and a LinkedIn alumni fund

Marketing tech startup Octave has raised $5.5 million to grow its AI-powered go-to-market platform.

The San Francisco-based startup helps companies build ideal customer profiles and decide their marketing campaign strategy.

The startup says it was born out of frustration with existing inbound marketing and sales tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.

“I spent 15 years on all these sales teams and the tools, they just suck energy from you, they don’t help you,” said Octave’s cofounder and CEO, Zach Vidibor. “Our mantra was really about being a battery-included experience.”

Vidibor, who has worked on sales teams at LinkedIn, DocuSign, and Dropbox, met his cofounder, Julian Tempelsman, at an internet safety startup that was acquired by Twitter in 2018.

“Think of GPT and Claude and Gemini and DeepSeek,” Vidibor said about how the platform harnesses AI. “Those are the engine, and we’ve built a car around it that drives on a very specific track.”

The round was led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Bee Partners, inVest Ventures — a fund focused on LinkedIn alumni — and angel investors. The seed round is Octave’s second cash injection, following a $2.9 million pre-seed round in 2022, which was led by Craft Ventures and Tidepool Labs.

The company launched publicly in February 2024 and works on a subscription-based freemium model. It offers customers a forever-free tier, and paid plans start at $150 a month and scale depending on usage, Vidibor said.

With the cash infusion, the startup said it would ramp up hiring in its go-to-market team, including engineers, product designers, and a head of growth.

The CEO said AI and the string of coding tools now available to engineers are playing a role in these hiring decisions.

Octave is “really trying to focus on people that have domain experience and building in areas that are close to our problem space,” he said. “Maybe you are not the rockstar, change the world engineer, but you can balance that out now, a little bit, with some of these tools.”

Check out the pitch deck Octave used to secure the fresh funding.

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