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 stuffed with completely different single-use instruments.
“It was a really irritating expertise,” Cho informed TechCrunch. “I needed to study and juggle all these completely different instruments. It felt like a really inefficient approach of getting your phrase out to customers. I’ve all the time been fascinated about easy methods to make advertising a bit extra environment friendly and efficient.”
Cho (pictured above on the left) sat on this concept for just a few years whereas engaged on engineering groups at corporations equivalent to Meta, Affirm, and Quick. After the developments in generative AI in 2022, he realized he would possibly be capable to clear up the advertising issues he had years earlier utilizing AI.
The end result was Tofu, an AI-driven B2B advertising platform that’s designed to convey all of an organization’s potential advertising campaigns into one house. The platform integrates with a advertising staff’s current workflow, and instruments like HubSpot and Salesforce, and makes use of AI to routinely modify advertising copy for various advertising channels and might personalize advertising content material for various buyer varieties.
Cho, Tofu co-founder and CEO, stated that whereas he bumped into his frustrations with advertising instruments whereas constructing a consumer-facing firm, he determined to concentrate on B2B advertising as a result of it’s considerably extra textual content heavy than B2C advertising, which made it a extra pure selection for a generative AI method.
Tofu’s staff consulted greater than 40 completely different CMOs earlier than writing any code, Cho stated, to determine what their largest ache factors have been. The 2 areas that got here up most constantly have been that CMOs needed to have the ability to personalize content material throughout completely different market segments and to repurpose content material for various channels. Cho stated that’s the place Tofu targeted first.
“When 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 stated. “Clearly there’s these small nuances, however it’s nothing that can not be embedded below one instrument.”
San Francisco-based Tofu launched in late 2023 and has seen robust demand. The corporate boasts 12x income progress, though it’s price noting that it’s solely been in operation for somewhat over a 12 months. Prospects embody DeepScribe, Test Level, and Wunderkind, amongst others.
The corporate is asserting a $12 million Collection A spherical led by SignalFire with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Correlation Ventures, amongst various current VC buyers and angel buyers.
Utilizing AI in advertising is just not essentially a brand new idea — nor a post-ChatGPT idea, both. Jasper, which helps enterprise corporations with AI-driven advertising, has been round for a decade and is valued at greater than $1.5 billion. Cordial, one other cross-channel advertising platform, has raised greater than $70 million in enterprise funding.
Cho acknowledged that the house is crowded however added that he thinks Tofu is in a superb place as a result of it touches so many various groups inside a advertising division, in comparison with a single-use instrument. That makes it stickier than a few of Tofu’s different opponents, he stated. The truth that Tofu isn’t only a ChatGPT wrapper and affords 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 develop the product’s capabilities as it really works towards constructing a supply of fact for advertising groups.
“It’s a noisy house,” Cho stated. “The way in which we place ourselves is to mainly say we exchange and might assist the a number of use instances 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.”
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