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 full of totally different single-use instruments.
“It was a really irritating expertise,” Cho informed TechCrunch. “I needed to study and juggle all these totally different instruments. It felt like a really inefficient means of getting your phrase out to customers. I’ve all the time been fascinated about learn how 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 together with Meta, Affirm, and Fast. After the developments in generative AI in 2022, he realized he would possibly be capable to remedy the advertising issues he had years earlier utilizing AI.
The consequence 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 present workflow, and instruments like HubSpot and Salesforce, and makes use of AI to mechanically 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 deal with 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 totally different CMOs earlier than writing any code, Cho stated, to determine what their largest ache factors had been. The two areas that got here up most constantly had been that CMOs needed to have the ability to personalize content material throughout totally different market segments and to repurpose content material for various channels. Cho stated that’s the place Tofu targeted first.
“If you actually give it some thought, there’s not that a lot delta between what you wish to write for perhaps an e mail versus what’s for a touchdown web page copy,” Cho stated. “Obviously there’s these small nuances, but it surely’s nothing that can not be embedded below one device.”
San Francisco-based Tofu launched in late 2023 and has seen sturdy demand. The firm boasts 12x income development, though it’s value noting that it’s solely been in operation for slightly over a yr. Customers embrace DeepScribe, Check Point, and Wunderkind, amongst others.
The firm is asserting a $12 million Series A spherical led by SignalFire with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Tau Ventures, and Correlation Ventures, amongst numerous present VC traders and angel traders.
Using AI in advertising shouldn’t be 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 it 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 alternative groups inside a advertising division, in comparison with single-use device. That makes it stickier than a few of Tofu’s different opponents, he stated. The undeniable fact that Tofu isn’t only a ChatGPT wrapper and provides an built-in end-to-end resolution makes them stand out, he added.
Now that Tofu has closed its Series A spherical, the corporate goes broaden the product’s capabilities as it really works towards constructing a supply of fact for advertising groups.
“It is a loud house,” Cho stated. “The means we place ourselves is to mainly say we substitute and might help the a number of use circumstances you’re buying particular person instruments for with one platform. So that unified platform is a really interesting worth proposition for purchasers, particularly enterprise prospects.”
