A whole host of AI startups are emerging to help marketers create ads to acquire new customers. Tel Aviv-based Eikona is using AI to help marketers retain those customers, an area often referred to as “lifecycle marketing.”
On Thursday, Eikona announced a $5 million seed investment round, led by StageOne Ventures. Crecendo Venture Partners, Wix Ventures, and Clarim Ventures also participated.
Eikona adds a generative AI layer to the practice of A/B testing, which is when marketers compare different versions of an email, SMS, or app push notification to figure out which one yields the best results.
Eikona has developed its own AI models that generate content from scratch and create different variations based on their performance. It built its own models on top of various existing popular AI models. Marketers can plug in their brand guidelines and past performance data to help Eikona fine-tune its models to personalize content to different users.
Nir Weingarten, Eikona’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider that A/B testing can often be hard to scale. And while some marketers are beginning to use AI to help create their marketing content and ads, the prompts they use can sometimes be limited and grounded in their own human biases.
“It’s hard to understand what worked — is it because the background was red, or was it a composition of things? This is something AI is good at: combining features,” Weingarten said.
Eikona integrates into marketers’ existing automation platforms. Asked what could stop a platform like Klaviyo, Braze, or Iterable from producing Eikona-like features themselves, Weingarten said his company’s advantage as a startup is that it can move quickly.
“This is the classic innovator’s dilemma,” Weingarten said.”Hopefully, we can get to distribution before the giants get to the innovation.”
Weingarten said the company plans to invest the fresh funds in further product development.
“We spent our first two to three years devoted to finding product-market fit,” Weingarten said. “We have the notion, we’ve validated, we understand the ability to create a lot of profit for users, and now we need to make this a product that people like to use.”
In five years, Weingarten hopes Eikona will become a market leader in a new category he describes as “adaptive marketing.”
“We want it to be a standard in the world, starting in lifecycle marketing, where every message that reaches a client is adapted in a certain way to be much more intimate, more personal, much more warm, and much better performing,” Weingarten said.
Check out the pitch deck Eikona used to secure its $5 million seed investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.
Eikona’s mission is to “end generic marketing.”
Its cofounders come from AI research backgrounds, rather than marketing.
Eikona quotes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Eureka Labs founder Andrej Karpathy to explain how top thinkers in the space believe AI excels at persuasion and reinforcement learning.
Weingarten said that an age-old problem in digital marketing is determining which creative assets are working and why.
A/B testing is challenging to scale, and AI prompting can be susceptible to biases introduced by the person inputting the prompts, Eikona says.
Eikona blends AI with A/B testing, but replaces prompts with reinforcement learning — allowing the model to pursue the best results it can achieve.
Eikona employs a method called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” which means the process is automated but still involves a human in the loop to set guardrails and approve the final marketing materials.
Eikona is initially tackling the “lifecycle marketing” space, where companies use methods such as email and SMS to keep customers engaged at each stage of their interactions with a brand.
Lifecycle marketing represents a multibillion-dollar total addressable market, per Eikona.
Eikona has six clients and lining up plans to work with a further five in the coming quarter.
This slide illustrates how a large online travel agent implemented Eikona’s algorithm in its promotional emails, resulting in a 20% increase in bookings versus the baseline.
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