Persado builds AI-powered marketing software that uses deep learning to create emotional profiles of individual users and generate personalized sales copy. The company has expanded its toolset to social media and supports channels including email, display, social advertising, landing pages, SMS and push notifications in up to 23 languages. Persado offers two product tiers: Persado Enterprise for multi-channel campaigns and Persado Professional for individual marketers. Its platform identifies which messages drove past responses and maps users into emotional buckets—pride, trust, anticipation, joy and fear—to tailor language. Co-founder Assaf Baciu has said campaigns using Persado can perform roughly 50% better than campaigns that do not use the software. Financially, Persado recently secured a new $30 million credit facility to boost its marketing reach and has earlier raised $30 million from Goldman Sachs and others. Persado's platform employs natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to generate the precise combination of words, phrases and images that motivate any audience in real time. It produces cognitive content for display ads, Facebook, email, website landing pages, SMS and mobile push notifications. Persado has deployed cognitive content in thousands of marketing campaigns and has accumulated response data from more than 40 billion impressions. The company serves more than 80 global brands, including Fortune 100 companies such as Microsoft, Verizon Wireless, Citi and Sears. Customers see a 49.5% average uplift in conversions, a 68.4% improvement in click-through rates, and Persado cites $1 billion in incremental revenues. Persado employs more than 200 people across nine global locations and plans to invest further in distribution, product development and expansion into additional digital channels and sectors beyond marketing, including pharmaceutical adherence, fitness and personal motivation, civic engagement and human resources. Persado builds a "persuasion automation" platform that automatically generates and tests variants of marketing emails and promotional messages. The automated approach lets marketers try many more message variants than traditional human-driven A/B testing, and the company says the technology avoids unintelligible or robotic output. Persado's software is designed to generate the most persuasive language for communications, removing much of the guesswork from copywriting. The company says the technology could expand beyond ads and marketing to other short, structured persuasive messages such as mobile health. A limitation is that the system requires the scale of a consumer audience, so Persado cannot use the technology in its own B2B marketing. Persado spun out of mobile marketing company Upstream and is led by co-founder and CEO Alex Vratskides. Persado provides persuasion‑marketing technology that analyzes and edits text‑based marketing (email, SMS, display, search) using algorithms trained on ad performance data to increase engagement. The platform combines data science, big‑data analytics and human oversight to generate optimized messaging and progressively automates editing as it learns. Current customers named in the article include Skype, Badoo and the mobile carrier TIM, plus several undisclosed tier‑one carriers. The company plans to establish a new headquarters in New York in addition to its London base and to invest the new proceeds in R&D and go‑to‑market efforts targeting ad agencies and brands. Persado claims its optimized messages can produce up to 100% higher click‑throughs versus control creatives. The article states that roughly $34M has been invested in Persado to date and that the business was spun out at the end of 2012.

Total raised

$96M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Oct 2017