Auxia, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by former executives from Google and Meta, announced today that it has raised $23.5 million to help large enterprises more effectively use their customer data.
VMG Technology Partners led the Series A funding round, with participation from Incubate Fund, MUFG Financial Group, and more than 50 industry leaders including Google CMO Lorraine Twohill, Booking.com CMO Arjan Dijk, and former Meta Chief Business Officer David Fischer.
The investment comes as companies across industries face what Indy Guha, general partner at VMG Partners, calls a “reacquisition treadmill” — the costly cycle of repeatedly paying to attract the same customers rather than building lasting relationships.
“Acquiring new shoppers hit an all-time high on cost in 2024,” Mr. Guha said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “In no small part, it’s because something like 75 percent of advertising dollars are controlled by Google, Meta, and Amazon.”
This market concentration has pushed customer acquisition costs to record levels, forcing companies to rethink their approach to marketing. “The only real pressure release valve isn’t better growth hacking, it’s ultimately customer loyalty,” Guha added.
How Auxia bridges the critical gap between data collection and customer experience
Auxia aims to solve a persistent gap in modern marketing technology. While companies have invested heavily in data collection tools like Snowflake and customer engagement platforms, they often lack the connective layer that transforms raw data into personalized customer experiences.
“There’s this whole mid-stage of how do you use your first-party data to better know who your customer is and how to talk to them,” Guha explained. Without specialized software, this typically requires hiring data scientists at half a million dollars each — a prohibitive cost for many organizations.
Sandeep Menon, co-founder and chief executive of Auxia, who previously led marketing for Google’s platform products including Android and Chrome, saw this problem firsthand at large technology companies.
“When I talk to CMOs and chief digital officers, the number one concern they have is that they’re sitting on all of this first-party data, but they don’t have the data science resources to actually make good use of it,” Menon said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.
Inside Auxia’s ecosystem of AI agents that transform enterprise marketing
Auxia’s platform employs what the company calls “agentic AI” — essentially a team of specialized artificial intelligence systems that work together to analyze customer data, make decisions, and deliver personalized experiences across channels.
“We have a suite of synchronized AI agents,” Menon said. “Their job is to assist marketers to deliver hyper-personalized experiences.”
These agents include a decisioning system that determines specific content for each user, an analyst that helps with attribution, and an experimentation agent that tests multiple approaches simultaneously. Together, they process over 2.5 billion events daily and make more than 250 million decisions each day across Auxia’s customer base.
The system represents a shift from traditional marketing approaches by focusing on individual customer journeys rather than broad segments.
“You are moving from what I call a campaign-centric approach, where you think about broad-based segments, to much more of a consumer or user-centric approach,” Menon said.
Auxia’s impressive results: 84% boost in customer lifetime value for global marketplace
Since launching in early 2024, Auxia has attracted several Fortune 1000 clients, including one of the world’s largest consumer-to-consumer marketplaces with over 25 million monthly active users. That customer reportedly saw an 84 percent increase in cross-category customer lifetime value within four months of deployment.
A global financial institution with over $650 billion in assets under management experienced a 50 percent boost in onboarding completion rates using the platform, according to the company.
“The specific use case is cross-category purchase — determining what is the right next category to promote to a particular user to drive increased lifetime value,” Menon explained.
While Auxia declined to name specific customers, citing confidentiality agreements, Guha noted that a “top five global bank” is already using the platform — unusual for an early-stage start-up in the financial sector, where security and compliance concerns typically slow adoption of new technology.
Why Auxia’s $2 trillion market opportunity could reshape enterprise marketing
The stakes are substantial for companies that get personalization right. According to Auxia, over $2 trillion in revenue is expected to shift to companies effectively using AI for personalization within the next five years.
However, this transition requires a fundamental shift in how marketing teams operate. Rather than creating rigid rules, Auxia’s approach focuses on what Menon calls “goals and guardrails.”
“The way the Auxia system works is that we are able to set goals, but along with setting goals, we have made it super easy for you to define what the guardrails are,” he said. This allows AI systems to optimize within boundaries established by human marketers.
The start-up has worked to address privacy concerns by relying exclusively on first-party data and building privacy controls into its infrastructure from the beginning. “We were GDPR compliant even before we launched with our first customer,” Menon noted, referring to Europe’s data protection regulation.
How Auxia’s vision parallels the internet marketing revolution of the early 2000s
With the new funding, Auxia plans to expand its engineering team and develop new AI capabilities. Menon believes the industry is at an inflection point similar to the early days of internet marketing.
“The closest parallel I can think about is when I started working, when the internet was just taking off,” he said. “The CMOs who embraced the internet survived, thrived and grew, and the others were laggards. Similarly, every marketing leader will need to help shepherd in this new change.”
The company faces competition from established marketing platforms including Salesforce and Google, though Guha argues that existing solutions offer only “narrow band personalization” rather than comprehensive customer journey optimization.
“If it’s done right, it will be transformative,” Guha concluded. “It is probably the largest unsolved problem left in digital marketing.”
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