Starting Marketing Automation with AI-Powered AI ConversionFived five years ago by two UC Berkeley Dropouts, it set a series of $ 28 million, led by the abstract, with the participation of True Ventures and Hof Capital.
The founding history of the company sounds like it was an episode of the HBO “Silicon Valley” demonstration.
The story begins to co -founder and CEO Neil Tewari, now 24 years old, was in the Gymnasium. He took a day watching a TechCrunch disrupted the livestream during the class, was sent to the manager’s office and had to stay late.
He is afraid to call his parents and tell them why they had to take him, he called one of their close friends. At home, Tewari explained to the friend what brought him to the problem. “I told him I had this interest [in entrepreneurship]And four years later, he was actually the first to write us a check in the company, “TechCrunch told TechCrunch.
James Jiao, a roommate of Tewari’s College at Berkeley-now the co-founder and CTO of Convention, also dreamed of setting up his own company, so the two tried to build various products, such as to help marketeers buy product mounting ads. They were intended for the idea of conversion when they signed for Hubspot to help them with marketing work and decided to build some additional automation features to lay over it.
“It was initially for us,” Tewari said of his starting technology. The co -founders enjoyed the building of the internal marketing tool so much, wondered if they could sell it and began arriving at Marketing executives for “Discovery Customer” interviews.
“We really spent two months doing 160 interviews with VPS marketing, 50 to 500 employees, and got a much more positive answer than we could imagine,” Tewari said.
TechCrunch event
Francisco
|
27-29 October 2025
The marketing groups had these tools deeply integrated into their work flows, but they all had similar complaints about the places that could not automate.
The twin had found their idea. Their family friend introduced them to more marketing performers, which helped them gather a round of $ 2 million. At the age of 19, they abandoned the college to work full -time in conversion.
The founders faced their elevated capital, so horrifying they lived in a two -bedroom apartment, a bath with five other roommates: two people in one room, with people sleeping on the couches and in the closet.
As they built their product, Chatgpt burst on stage. Many Legacy Marketing tools add various AI integations and conversations to their products, but not all their features support these integration. Marketing groups wanted “to be able to enrich contacts, [be] Able to automate work flows, for example, Tewari said.
Since the interest of AI has increased, the company’s prospects have also increased. The conversion has been approaching $ 10 million in the last two years, Tewari said and about 90% of its customers are medium -sized businesses that have drawn a legacy.
Of course, conversion is also in a busy field. In addition to Legacy Marketing Automation Tools, such as Hubspot, Adobe Marketo or Salesforce Pardot, there are other indigenous startup and a lot others.
But Tewari also has the classic confidence of Silicon Valley of a founder in a busy market. His play plan requires the targeting of businesses used by older marketing tools. Converting is not, for example, the targeting of the newly established businesses that choose a tool for the first time.
The company has raised a total of $ 30 million between the seed and the A, the CEO says and is doing well enough that the founders have moved to separate apartments where they have their own rooms and none of their roommates sleep in a closet.
