A whole host of AI startups are emerging to help marketers create ads to acquire new customers. Tel Aviv-based Eikona is using AI to help marketers retain those customers, an area often referred to as “lifecycle marketing.”
On Thursday, Eikona announced a $5 million seed investment round, led by StageOne Ventures. Crecendo Venture Partners, Wix Ventures, and Clarim Ventures also participated.
Eikona adds a generative AI layer to the practice of A/B testing, which is when marketers compare different versions of an email, SMS, or app push notification to figure out which one yields the best results.
Eikona has developed its own AI models that generate content from scratch and create different variations based on their performance. It built its own models on top of various existing popular AI models. Marketers can plug in their brand guidelines and past performance data to help Eikona fine-tune its models to personalize content to different users.
Nir Weingarten, Eikona’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider that A/B testing can often be hard to scale. And while some marketers are beginning to use AI to help create their marketing content and ads, the prompts they use can sometimes be limited and grounded in their own human biases.
“It’s hard to understand what worked — is it because the background was red, or was it a composition of things? This is something AI is good at: combining features,” Weingarten said.
Eikona integrates into marketers’ existing automation platforms. Asked what could stop a platform like Klaviyo, Braze, or Iterable from producing Eikona-like features themselves, Weingarten said his company’s advantage as a startup is that it can move quickly.
“This is the classic innovator’s dilemma,” Weingarten said.”Hopefully, we can get to distribution before the giants get to the innovation.”
Weingarten said the company plans to invest the fresh funds in further product development.
“We spent our first two to three years devoted to finding product-market fit,” Weingarten said. “We have the notion, we’ve validated, we understand the ability to create a lot of profit for users, and now we need to make this a product that people like to use.”
In five years, Weingarten hopes Eikona will become a market leader in a new category he describes as “adaptive marketing.”
“We want it to be a standard in the world, starting in lifecycle marketing, where every message that reaches a client is adapted in a certain way to be much more intimate, more personal, much more warm, and much better performing,” Weingarten said.
Check out the pitch deck Eikona used to secure its $5 million seed investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.
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