Founders: David Henriquez, Sean Marshall, Mike Torra
Founding: 2023
Mission: Quickly create, test & deploy content everywhere
Employees: 8 & 80%+ Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-seed & $4.8M raised
Investors: Asymmetric Capital, Underscore VC, Ed Hallen, Andrew Bialecki, Jeff Barnett, Tom Ebling
Key Customers: Million Dollar Baby, Immi Eats
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming average equity dilution in the $4.8M Pre-Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Copley is building an enterprise grade, AI-powered content optimization and experimentation platform for commerce. They are leveling the playing field to help growing brands compete with the largest storefronts in the world in a scalable way. This veteran team from Klaviyo & Salesforce has climbed the mountain before and they’re on a mission to help emerging brands do the same.
David Henriquez led engineering projects for partners like Salesforce and customers like Kendo Brands, Steve Madden, and Staples at Klaviyo. David eventually led their Developer Ecosystem. After 5+ years he left Klaviyo and recruited his college roommate, Mike Torra, to democratize advanced AI and data science to help brands grow. David also kept in touch with Sean Marshall, his original hiring manager, who built and led Klaviyo’s global sales org from $20M to $450M+ in revenue and growing the team by hiring over 300 people.
What do you get when you combine two world class engineers with a world class GTM leader? You get Copley, an incredibly fit founding team ready to lead e-commerce businesses into an AI-powered future!
Klaviyo is a best in class retention platform but their best customers were always asking them about innovative ways to acquire new customers. Chief Digital Officers would come to David, Sean & their team asking them for expertise on growth & differentiation. The very best brands had built their own internal experimentation engines, encompassing internal tools, UI/UX optimization, ads, website design, and entire teams dedicated to customized growth. Basically, they tested everything on every channel all the time.
However, a holistic, deeply scientific approach to experimentation is expensive and complex. Copley is democratizing these tools, previously only available to the largest budget brands, for the millions of brands who don’t have millions to build this themselves (src). These customers have two huge assets – products & content. Scaling content is hard and is only getting more difficult. Since 2020, the average CPM on Facebook has risen almost 70% (src).
Copley is building a platform to help brands in an era of rising costs and tighter funding environments create & optimize content assets at scale. They are building an AI-powered solution to analyze creative assets, break down channel silos, and help their customers acquire more customers in an efficient, scientifically driven way to compete with their larger, better resourced competitors.
With Copley’s initial launch, they are offering two products: Traits (free!) and Experimentation (managed). Traits allows Shopify brands to benefit from instant creative tagging across thousands of historical creative assets using large language models. Customers can upload their creative assets and Copley’s AI can quickly tag years worth of creative automatically based on common attributes like background color, number of products shown, or whether there’s a question in the text.
Because everything is programmatic, brands no longer have to do manual tagging. They can look back at five years of data and uncover hidden correlations like “do single-product images convert better than multi-product ones?” in minutes. Brands gain immediate visibility into historical creative performance across campaigns that would take humans countless hours.
Their Experimentation product allows for automated testing, starting with ads on Meta platforms and soon expanding to channels such as TikTok, Google, etc. with website & e-mail testing to follow. Instead of labor-intensive setups in Meta Ads Manager, Copley handles budget allocation, audience sampling, and statistical significance tracking for you.
One of Copley’s customers, Million Dollar Baby, had been testing 5-10 creative concepts per quarter. With Copley, they have scaled to run 150 creative tests and learned which assets drive the highest ROI. All with the same size marketing team and Copley handling the data science! Now, they have more confidence to run hundreds of tests moving forward to scale their growth.
In the coming months Copley plans to widen their funnel with Traits to get as many e-commerce marketers as possible using the auto-tagging and creative analytics engine. Copley’s roadmap includes integrating further into Shopify storefronts, e-mail marketing flows like Klaviyo, and other paid channels to unify your content strategy across the entire funnel.
Another upcoming feature will allow marketers to ask an AI-driven agent complex questions about campaign performance, creative attributes, and recommended next steps bringing conversational analytics to e-commerce growth.
In Q2 they will begin monetizing their initial user base and are looking for forward-thinking e-commerce operators who want to run large-scale experimentation. If you’re a DTC brand looking to run 100+ tests a quarter without adding headcount, they’d love to talk!
Backed with $4.8M from Asymmetric Capital and Underscore VC, Copley is hiring selectively for top engineering talent and will continue to grow from their Boston HQ right near Post Office Square. If you’re a Shopify brand, you need to try out Traits for free.
Operators to Know:
- Michael Carlise, Principal Software Engineer
- Madeleine Daly, Staff Software Engineer
- Angela Lin, Product Designer
- Kevin Mcnerny, Principal Software Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Copley team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the key milestones for 1H 2025?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the platform to dozens of paying customers?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important functions you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // areas that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Copley you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more commerce businesses into the age of AI. All commerce brands applaud your efforts. See you around town!