Founders: Alexander May, Jeff Palmucci, & Christina Pawlikowski
Founding: 2021
Mission: Empowering Marketers with AI-Driven Copy Optimization
Employees: 6 & 100% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4M raised
Investors: 186 Ventures, Founder Collective, Pear VC & Notable Angels from Tableau, Adobe & Flywire
Key Customers: Coming Soon
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the $4M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Causal Labs is building an AI workflow automation platform for marketers, empowering teams with AI-Driven copy optimization. Because Kyle from your marketing agency might be hungover, or is at the very least disinterested, in brainstorming another dozen copy variations for your landing pages. How much does he even really know about your business?
Causal’s Founders Alexander May, Jeff Palmucci, & Christina Pawlikowski all met at TripAdvisor. Christina had joined the personalization team as a Product leader out of grad school working with Jeff, the Head of the Machine Intelligence group, and Alex who led Engineering to build machine learning tools that helped customize the TripAdvisor customer experience.
After four years Christina departed to join web3 startup Circle, where she led Product, but she missed working with Alex & Jeff. The friends began talking about starting a company together on the eve of Covid and spent the summer of 2020 exchanging startup ideas. Social distancing of course.
The trio founded Causal Labs on the premise that machine learning teams at consumer tech companies need better tools to optimize their models – gathering good data, shipping new features, and measuring the effectiveness of performance in real time. It was an infrastructure concept and, as they began experimenting with different architecture & using LLMs for the first time, it seemed like there were a lot of ripe opportunities for leveraging these new tools at the application layer instead.
As Consumer Product people conducting customer research, they knew (and heard) how hard it was to change product pages for testing. What if the headline was different? What if we changed the copy on that button to say “View Deal”? How about tweaking the layout?
Almost 10% of a company’s revenue is spent on marketing (src). The digital advertising market is now over $60B and growing at over 15% per year (src). It’s an exciting opportunity for businesses and marketers who take advantage of new growth tools. But it’s also a lot of work to bring it all together and build a digital marketing engine that performs well.
There is a steady drumbeat of optimization needed to rack up small wins that shouldn’t necessitate Product & Engineering resources. Growth & Marketing teams, particularly those that do a lot of Paid Advertising, spend a lot of their time testing different copy concepts and patching together workflows to deliver consistent results. What if they could put that on autopilot?
Causal Labs is building AI copy optimization so marketers can focus on more important priorities like strategy, creative production & brainstorming. There are lots of “copy generators” out there but LLMs on their own don’t really generate great copy or take into account historical performance to drive testing.
Causal Bandit sits on customer landing pages and in their conversion funnel to help properly sync landing page copy to the advertisements being run. Next, the software tweaks and iterates the pages to generate alternate versions and split traffic without anyone needing to create new landing pages or integrate external tools to conduct analysis. Over time, their product automatically optimizes the landing page based on the learnings gained, generating new copy variations too.
There is some hands-on calibration time at the beginning to better understand brand guidelines, but from there it’s pretty hands off. Teams save time they might otherwise spend in meetings brainstorming “strategy” i.e. copy ideas with agencies, creating new landing pages, or matching excel sheets with internal codes so that ads, copy & landing pages all sync up.
Causal is most ideal for large search & paid social advertisers, acting as a workflow automation tool for middle & back office work that should either be outsourced or automated to let machines do the “button clicking” and copying & pasting. From a performance perspective, their product reports out on what has been tried, what’s working, and the overall conversion lift Causal delivers with additional reporting per page & per variant as needed.
Any B2C company that buys five to six figures worth of search & social ads monthly, with lead generation funnels that need to be maintained & optimized, tend to be a great fit. Really any company that leverages paid advertising as a core part of their growth strategy can leverage Causal.
Today their revenue model is a SaaS model with a flat monthly licensing fee, based on customer traffic volume. Over time they will plan to evolve pricing based on usage, conversion lift, and event based outcomes. They might even help write the copy for their ads!
The team is in the deployment phase of scaling up their customer base to dozens of customers in 2024. Causal is backed by 186 Ventures, Founder Collective, Pear VC, and notable Angels from Tableau, Adobe & Flywire winning the Emerging Tech Company of the Year at the 2023 NEVYs. They’ll be hiring for Sales Engineering & Customer Support help later this year and likely grow the Engineering team too.
Operators to Know:
- Louis Calisi, Principal Software Engineer
- Tony Haenn, VP of Product
- Paul Meyerle, Principal Software Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Causal Labs team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- New roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- How long does it usually take to see lift from Causal Bandit based on traffic threshold(s)?
- What are the biggest competitors to this AI powered workflow automation tool?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Causal Labs you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more marketers into the AI age. All understaffed and overstretched applaud your efforts. See you around town!