Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to non-technical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. Today the company announced a funding round totalling $11 million.
The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Amino Capital, Startup Capital Ventures and Sterling Road.
Breinify co-founder and CEO Diane Keng says that she and co-founder and CTO Philipp Meisen started the company to bring predictive personalization based on data science to marketers with the goal of helping them improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes.
“We’re big believers that the world, especially consumer brands, really need strong predictive personalization. But when you think about consumer big brands or the retailers that you buy from, most of them aren’t data scientists, nor do they really know how to activate [machine learning] at scale,” Keng told TechCrunch.
She says that she wanted to make this type of technology more accessible by hiding the complexity behind the algorithms powering the platform. “Instead of telling you how powerful the algorithms are, we show you [what that means for the] consumer experience, and in the end what that means for both the consumer and you as a marketer individually,” she said.
That involves the kind of customizations you might expect around website messaging, emails, texts or whatever channel a marketer might be using to communicate with the buyer. “So the AI decides you should be shown these products, this offer, this specific promotion at this time, [whether it’s] the web, email or SMS. So you’re not getting the same content across different channels, and we do all that automatically for you, and that’s [driven by the algorithms] ,” she said.
Breinify launched in 2016 and < a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/breinify-tells-online-retailers-what-customers-want-to-buy-at-a-specific-point-in-time/"> participated in your TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battleground competition inside San Francisco that year. The girl said it was early days for any of the company, but it helped these people focus their approach. “I think it gave connected with a huge stage presence. The problem gave us a chance to try on the idea just to see the actual market was in regards with needing a solution like this. Both of us definitely learned a lot. Book it showed us that people were initially interested in personalization, ” he said. And although the employer} didn’t win the competition, this ended up walking away with a aquiring funds deal.
In these days the startup is growing really fast and has 24 employees, all the way up from 10 last year. Keng, who is an Asian young lady, places a high premium at diversity.
“We partner with about four choosing diversity groups right now to finally source candidates, but all in all, I think if you are someone that is eager to learn, and you may possibly not have all the skills yet, and also you’re [part of an under-represented] group we encourage we to apply as much as possible. We inserted a lot of work into looking for create a really well rounded workforce, ” she said.
