Artificial Intelligence (AI) based cloud marketing startup Pixis Software Inc. on Thursday said it has raised $100 million (Rs 745 crore) as part of its Series C funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, paving the way for the partial exit of early investor Exfinity Venture Partners.
New investor General Atlantic and existing investors Celesta Capital, Premji Invest, and Chiratae Ventures, also participated in the funding round, said Pixis, formerly Pyxis One, in a statement.
The startup will use the fresh capital to scale its AI platforms and plugins. Part of the funds will also be deployed to boost its expansion across North America, Europe, and India.
Pixis, which was founded in 2018 by Shubham Mishra, Vrushali Prasade, and Harikrishna Valiyath, has raised $124 million in funding so far. The startup provides codeless AI infrastructure to enable customers to scale accurate data-driven marketing.
The startup claims that its customers using its platform have witnessed a 20% decrease in acquisition costs on average.
"The alluring factor for customers, however, is definitely the prospect of activating AI in 8 seconds without having to write a single line of code," it added.
Pixis aims to add over 200 customizable self-evolving AI models to the infrastructure it provides. The startup said that it has already introduced close to four dozen AI models since its last funding.
Priya Saiprasad, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, noted that marketing is one of the largest spending categories for companies but many of its decisions are still driven by intuition rather than data.
"Pixis has developed an end-to-end codeless AI infrastructure, that equips teams with cutting-edge data science to automate and improve core processes, from budget allocation to real-time campaign optimization and reporting," added Saiprasad.
As part of the transaction, early-stage venture capital firm Exfinity Venture Partners has partially exited. In a separate statement, Exfinity Venture Partners said that it has made 37 times returns by selling 2.54% of its holding in Pixis to existing institutional investors without identifying them.
"As a partner, they (Exfinity) have been instrumental in helping us reach our inflection point through key ecosystem connects which aided in us signing our first major customer," said Pixis' cofounder Mishra.
Exfinity Venture Partners, whose other portfolio firms include Mad Street Den, Locus, Deep Vision, is currently raising its third fund that has a target corpus of Rs 500 crore.
