When EJ Cho started his first company in 2018, he was exposed to what needed to market a product. It was surprised to find a market full of different disposable tools.
“It was a very frustrating experience,” Cho told TechCrunch. “I had to learn and weigh all these different tools. It felt like a very ineffective way to get your word to users. Always fascinated about how to make marketing a little more effective and effective.”
Cho (depicted above on the left) sat on this idea for a few years, while working in engineers in companies such as Meta, Abirm and Fast. Following developments in Genetic AI in 2022, he realized that he could solve the marketing problems he had years earlier using AI.
The result was TofuA B2B B2B marketing platform with AI designed to bring all possible marketing campaigns of a company in a space. The platform is incorporated with the existing workflow of a marketing team and tools such as Hubspot and SalesForce and uses AI to automatically modify the marketing copy for different marketing channels and can personalize marketing content for different customer types.
Cho, co -founder and chief executive of Tofu, said that while ran to his frustrations with marketing tools, while building a company that sees consumers, he decided to focus on B2B Marketing because it is significantly more heavy than B2C Marketing which made it more natural choice for a AI genetic approach.
The Tofu team consulted more than 40 different CMOS before writing any code, Cho said, to understand what were their biggest pain points. The two areas that came more steady were that the CMOS wanted to be able to personalize the content in different sections of the market and redefine the content for different channels. Cho said there is the tofu there first focused.
“If you really think about it, there is not so much delta between what you want to write about perhaps an email in relation to what it is for a destination page,” Cho said. “Obviously there are these small shades, but it’s nothing that cannot be integrated under a tool.”
The San Francisco -based tofu started in late 2023 and has seen intense demand. The company has an increase in 12x revenue, although it is worth noting that it operates only for just over a year. Customers include Deepscribe, Point Check and Wunderkind, among others.
The company announces a $ 12 million A -series round, led by Signalfire with the participation of Hubspot Ventures, Tau Ventures and Ventures Correlation, among many existing VC investors and angel investors.
The use of AI in marketing is not necessarily a new idea-never an idea after chatgpt. Jasper, which helps marketing business companies with AI-Driven, has been over a decade and is valued at more than $ 1.5 billion. Cordial, another cross -channel marketing platform, increased more than $ 70 million in business funding.
Cho acknowledged that the space was full, but added that he believes that the tofu is in good position because it touches so many different groups in a marketing section, compared to a disposable tool. This makes it more sticky than some of the other Tofu competitors, he said. The fact that the tofu is not just a chatgpt wrapper and offers a complete end -to -end solution makes them stand out, he added.
Now that Tofu has closed A, the company will expand the capabilities of the product as it is working to build a source of truth for marketing groups.
“It’s a noisy space,” Cho said. “The way we place ourselves is to say basically that we are replacing and we can support the multipurpose cases you buy individual tools for a platform. Thus, the consolidated platform is a very attractive value proposal for customers, especially customers of business. “
