Huge 85 million fundraising round for Pixis, the revolutionary AI-powered marketing platform!

Pixis announces an $85 million round of funding for its AI for marketing

Pixis, an artificial intelligence-powered platform enabling brands to monitor and orchestrate their marketing campaigns, announced today that it has raised $85 million in a Series C1 financing round. The round was led by Touring Capital, with participation from Grupo Carso, General Atlantic, Celesta Capital and Chiratae Ventures.

Growing demand for AI in marketing

This round of funding brings the total amount raised by Pixis to $209 million, and comes at a time when marketers are showing increasing interest in the potential of AI to improve their in-house advertising efforts. According to a recent survey by The Conference Board, the majority of marketers have already integrated AI into their daily workflows, and most expect increased adoption of AI to improve their productivity.

Pixis on the rise

For its part, Pixis claims to have exceeded $50 million in annual recurring revenues this quarter, with a customer base exceeding 200 brands, including DHL, Joe & The Juice, Sears and Swiggy. Having grown 140% in 2023, Pixis expects to reach profitability in the fourth quarter.

A new priority for post-pandemic organizations

Shubham Mishra, co-founder and CEO of Pixis, says: "We've seen a palpable shift in organizations' priorities post-pandemic. There is an increased focus on maximizing profitability and ensuring sustainable growth. It's no longer just about weathering the storm, but thriving in the new normal."

A pivot to marketing

Originally, Mishra and Pixis' other co-founders, Hari Valiyath and Vrushali Prasade, met at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, Rajasthan, India. The three were studying generative AI, in particular AI for creating art and resources for games.

But once they realized how large the addressable market for AI in marketing was becoming, Mishra, Valiyath and Prasade decided to pivot. Together, they built a prototype to generate marketing resources, which caught the attention of a major banking chain. From there, Mishra, Valiyath and Prasade began laying the foundations for a complete marketing platform to generate resources, dynamically target customers and monitor campaign performance in real time.

This complete solution became Pixis.

The pillars of the Pixis platform

The Pixis platform can be divided into three main pillars: targeting, creation and performance.

On the targeting side, Pixis uses AI to identify - and ideally convert - audiences for a given brand, product or advertising campaign. On the creative side, Pixis can generate assets such as texts, images and e-mails. And when it comes to performance, Pixis offers automated ad bidding and budget management tools that attempt to mitigate the impact of short-term fluctuations and seasonality.

Customization for every brand

Each brand that works with Pixis benefits from its own "personalized learnings" based on the brand's unique marketing data and objectives, explains Mishra. Pixis uses these learnings to support its automation and creative tools, also structuring the learnings back to the brand in the form of insights and strategies.

Pixis looks to the future of AI

Recently, Pixis launched a chatbot tool called Pixis Analyze that lets users ask questions about campaigns, marketing data and various "AI actions". The company's more ambitious project is Creative Studio, an editing suite for refining the media production of its generative AI models. Creative Studio is available to current Pixis partners and will be launched for new customers next year.

Mishra says the funds from Pixis' latest round of financing will be used to support the company's R&D, expand its infrastructure to reach more publishers and ad networks, and establish strategic product and business partnerships. In the short term, Pixis plans to expand its workforce by 350 people, focusing on sales and business development teams in North and Latin America, and to assume debt in the fourth quarter for a potential acquisition.