Customers.ai

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Founder: Larry Kim
Founding: 2023
Mission: Helping tens of thousands of ecommerce companies grow faster and more efficiently with website visitor identification and remarketing solutions
Employees: 30 & 50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: $4.999 Million Series A raised
Investors: ScOp Venture Capital, Link Ventures & notable Angels
Key Customers: Agile Offroad, Manly Bands, Infinite Agency, Triple Whale
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $25M – $50M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the $5M Series A 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!

Customers.ai is a provider of website visitor identification and remarketing solutions that turn anonymous prospects into customers. Using smart identification capabilities, this team is enriching a business’s first party website visitor data to unlock a new growth channel in an increasingly expensive digital acquisition landscape.

Customers.ai was founded by Larry Kim, previously the CTO & Founder of Wordstream. Over their 10 year journey, before a successful $150M acquisition by Gannett in 2018, Wordstream grew to work with tens of thousands of advertisers and agencies managing over $1B of annualized ad spend. Other than their consistent growth, there was another crystal clear trendline – the cost of acquisition steadily marching higher. 

The competition is fierce. It is increasingly difficult for companies to maintain profit margins and ROAS. After Larry exited the company, he took some time off to renovate a haunted house in Cambridge. But he couldn’t stay away! He’s a startup guy and there is more innovation to be done! 

Yearly digital advertising spend has crossed $300B and is on track to reach $400B by the end of the decade (src). When Wordstream was started in 2008, the digital advertising market was <$25B.. (src) Much has changed.

Larry assembled a team to build Customers.ai, fka Mobile Monkey, to bring proprietary insights into creating a radically more scalable way of doing demand generation. Traditionally, single digit percentages of (mostly anonymous) website visitors make a purchase. Data shows that many acquisition campaigns are loss leaders. But one consistently profitable growth category is remarketing. 

Their secret sauce is building an assembly process of consumer data focused on the pain point of customer acquisition. They leverage external data partners and internal methodologies to layer analysis on top of raw data ingestion to come up with better ways of identifying unique visitors. Their technology generates visitor identification data like an e-mail, name, or even physical address for an additional 20-30% of website visitors so those prospects can be marketed via other channels. Their tools help make sense of that information.

In a similar way that users are tagged by geo location as they move across websites, Customers.ai enriches data to create an ID of a device or browser.

Customers.ai is 50% a data company and 50% a software application company, helping their customers make sense of their data with analytics. Their data onboarding partners are major publishers like the New York Times. They are integrated with leading e-mail providers like Klaviyo, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Gmail, GoHighLevel, SendLane and others. 

Across their partnership ecosystem and enrichment engine, they can find a host of data like first & last name, e-mails, consumer information like marital status or income, and B2B information like industry, job title, and LinkedIn profile. They then enrich that data to make it actionable via e-mail or advertising platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, or TikTok Ads Manager for better targeting. Their segmentation tools can help better organize sequences to send the right prospects the right message at the right time. In certain cases they can even send you a postcard! 

Today Customers.ai works with over 1,000 brands to build a better growth marketing engine with over 100 agency referral partners. The business has already grown to mid single digit millions of ARR and added approximately $1M in ARR last quarter (Q2 2024). The team is about 30 people between full time employees & contractors.

Their Series A fundraise was led by Kevin O’Connor, the previous founder of DoubleClick, now leading ScOp Venture Capital. Customers.ai is also backed by Link Ventures and a handful of notable Angels.

Throughout the rest of 2024 they will be hiring for Growth Marketing and Demand Generation specialists. After 15+ years in the industry, Larry wants people to know that this is “real leverage”. It’s rare to come across a channel that can change the course of your business and, in his words, “this is one”.

So give Customers.ai a try! Here is a free trial and you can even generate a free website report to test the next generation of remarketing solutions, helping you nurture your existing visitors.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Customers.ai 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 differentiators for Customers.ai relative to competitors?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you continue to scale the team?
  • 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 Customers.ai you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help more growth marketers lower their acquisition costs. All advertisers applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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