On Monday, Scrapbookan AI-powered platform that helps companies monitor media coverage, announced a $3 million seed round led by Mark Cuban, Commonweal Ventures and Carpenter Capital.
The deal happened because Clipbook founder Adam Joseph took a big chance on a cold email he never thought anyone would read, he told TechCrunch.
Joseph launched Clipbook in 2023 and launched it at $1 million in annual recurring revenue, he said. At that point, about a year ago, he felt he was ready to find investors.
“I literally made a list of the top five media investors in the world,” Joseph recalls. Its product uses artificial intelligence to help companies monitor what people are saying about them and their competitors in the press, podcasts and social media. So he wanted investors who understood that scene.
Mark Cuban, who has founded media networks, starred on “Shark Tank,” written books, produced films and is regularly interviewed on television, topped Joseph’s list.
So, One night in late 2024, Joseph drank a beer for courage and sent a one-page investment proposal via cold email to everyone on the list. No warm input.
The Cuban, alone, answered. Turns out, busy and inundated with pitches that he is, Cuban is still scanning his own emails. He’s always looking for his next deal. “I’ve invested literally tens of millions of dollars from email, and a lot of it has paid off, turned into unicorns,” Cuban tells TechCrunch about why he responded to Clipbook.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
But before Cuban opened his checkbook, he put Joseph through a series of tests. His first email response “was the most skeptical 20 questions he could ever ask,” Joseph recalls.
Cuban admits he’s pretty famous for it since “Shark Tank.”
“When I start peppering them, they wilt, right? They wilt or get angry at a certain level,” Cuban explained. “It’s their baby. They don’t like to be questioned, do they? But Adam was like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”
After answering every question to Cuban’s satisfaction, the billionaire asked Joseph to prove the product by creating a report about Cuban’s baby: CostPlus Drugs. This is an online pharmacy and a non-profit company co-founded in 2022 that prices drugs affordably at cost plus 15%.
“I know how hard it is to do PR and marketing research, and to learn about it [competitor] companies and to find out what people are saying about your own company,” Cuban explained.
Not that Clipbook doesn’t have plenty of competitors that also do this job. Sprinklr is one of the most well-known, but others include Sprout Social, Emmplify, Hootsuite, and more.
Joseph argues that Clipbook is different because it was built from the ground up to be native to artificial intelligence. This means it doesn’t just scan for keywords, but understands the context of how those words are used. He knows that media references to “cost” and “drugs” are not the same as searching for CostPlus Drugs. He knows the difference between any person named “Adam Joseph” and the one who is the founder of Clipbook.
That it’s native AI (not an AI bolt-on) also helps it go where other products struggle to go, such as audio and video podcast reports, Joseph argues. He built this product after doing public relations work for the Boston Consulting Group, so he experienced firsthand the pain of media sentiment research, he said.
Joseph quickly created the report for Kuban that really “nailed” related reports, says Kuban. He was particularly impressed when he uncovered a previously unknown podcast conversation about pharmacy benefit services.
After a few days of negotiations, Kuban agreed to send Joseph a term sheet. The first part of this round closed in early 2025, and other investors piled in over the following months.
Joseph declined to share updated ARR figures with TechCrunch since the seed round closed — except that the company has grown since its first million. But the firm now counts 200 firms as clients, including Weber Shandwick and his old employer, the Boston Consulting Group, he says.
See the latest revelations on everything from agent AI and cloud infrastructure to security and more from the flagship Amazon Web Services event in Las Vegas. This feed is brought to you in partnership with AWS.
