Auxia raises $23.5 million to tackle enterprise marketing’s ‘reacquisition treadmill’

DuAn artificial intelligence startup founded by former executives from Google and Meta, announced today Raised $23.5 million Help large enterprises use their customer data more effectively.

VMG Technology Partners Leading the Series A funding round and participating from Incubation Funds, MUFG Financial Group and over 50 industry leaders. Two History of Lorrainebooking.com cmo Arjan Dijk and former chief business officer David Fischer.

The investment comes as companies in the industry face what Indy Guha, general partner of VMG partners, called “recalculating treadmills,” which is the price of repeated payments to attract the same customer rather than building lasting relationships.

“Acquiring new shoppers hits an all-time high cost in 2024,” Mr. Guha said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “In large part, this is because about 75% of advertising funds are controlled by Google, Meta and Amazon.”

This market concentration has pushed customers’ acquisition costs to record levels, forcing companies to rethink their marketing methods. “The only real pressure release valve is not a better growth hack, which is ultimately customer loyalty,” Guha added.

How Auxia bridges the critical gap between data collection and customer experience

Auxia aims to address the ongoing gap in modern marketing technology. When companies invest heavily in data collection tools snowflake and customer engagement platforms, they often lack connective tissue that converts raw data into personalized customer experiences.

“During the mid-term, how do you use first-party data to better understand who your customers are and how to talk to them,” Guha explains. Without dedicated software, this often requires hiring data scientists per person, which is a high cost for many organizations.

Auxia co-founder and CEO Sandeep Menon, who previously led the marketing of Google platform products, including Android and Chrome, has witnessed this issue firsthand in large tech companies.

“When I talked to the CMO and the chief digital officer, the first follower they met was that they sat on all this first-party data, but they didn’t have data science resources to really take advantage of it,” Menon said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.

In Auxia’s AI Agent ecosystem, enterprise marketing can be transformed

Auxia’s platform adopts what the company calls “agent AI,” which is essentially a professional AI system team that analyzes customer data together, makes decisions and provides a personalized experience across channels.

“We have a simultaneous AI agent,” Menon said. “Their job is to assist marketers with a super personalized experience.”

These agents include a decision-making system that determines specific content for each user, aids attribution analysts, and an experimental agent who tests multiple methods simultaneously. Together, they handle more than 2.5 billion events a day, making over $250 million decisions per day among Auxia’s customer base.

The system represents a shift in traditional marketing approaches by focusing on a single customer journey rather than a wide range of market segments.

“You are moving from what I’m talking about a campaign-centric approach (you think based on a broad segment) to a consumer or user-centric approach,” Menon said.

Auxia’s impressive results: Customer life value in global markets grew by 84%

Since its launch in early 2024, Auxia has attracted several Fortune 1,000 customers, including one of the world’s largest consumer-to-consumer markets, with over 25 million active users per month. The customer reportedly increased the value of customer life across categories by 84% within four months of deployment.

The company said a global financial institution with more than $65 billion in asset management assets increased boarding completion rates using the platform by 50%.

“Specific use cases are buying across categories – identifying the correct next category for the next category that is promoted to a specific user to drive the added life value,” Menon explained.

Although Auxia refuses to name specific customers and cites a nondisclosure agreement, Guha notes that the “top five banks in the world” are already using the platform – unusual for early-stage startups in the financial sector, security and compliance involves slow adoption of new technologies.

Why Auxia’s $2 trillion market opportunity can reshape corporate marketing

For companies that are right to personalize, these bets are huge. According to Auxia, more than $2 trillion in revenue is expected to be effectively transferred using AI for personalized transfers over the next five years.

However, this transition requires a fundamental change in the way the marketing team works. Instead of setting strict rules, Auxia’s approach focuses on what Menon calls “targets and guardrails.”

“The way Auxia System works is that we are able to set goals, but with the goal set, we make it very easy for you to define what the guardrail is,” he said. This allows AI systems to be optimized within the boundaries established by human marketers.

The startup solves privacy issues by relying solely on first-party data and building privacy controls into its infrastructure from the very beginning. “We have been GDPR-compliant even before we even started with the first client,” Menon noted.

How Auxia’s vision and the Internet marketing revolution in the early 2000s

With new funding, Auxia plans to expand its engineering team and develop new AI capabilities. Menon believes that the industry is at a point of change similar to the early stages of Internet marketing.

“The closest I can think of is when I started working, the internet just took off,” he said. “CMOs that embrace the internet survived and flourished and grew, while others were laggards. Again, every marketing leader needs to help the shepherd make this new change.”

The company faces competition from established marketing platforms Salesforce and Adobealthough Guha believes existing solutions offer only “narrow personalization” rather than comprehensive customer journey optimization.

“If done right, it would be transformative,” Guha concluded. “This is probably the biggest unsolved issue left in digital marketing.”