Creating the different types of content needed for large-scale B2B campaigns often results in marketers juggling dozens of tools. This makes it difficult to ensure consistent messages in your emails, landing pages and other materials, say the founders of tofu. The startup wants to solve that problem, especially for small marketing teams, with an ai-based generative platform that creates content for large-scale omnichannel B2B campaigns. The company announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from SignalFire, Stage 2 Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures.
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Tofu is currently in beta mode with enterprise customers and has over 300 qualified leads in its pipeline. It was founded earlier this year by Eunjoon (EJ) Cho, Elaine Zelby, and Honglei Liu. Before launching Tofu, Zelby built and led marketing teams at Slack, Consensys, and Capriza, while Liu held machine learning leadership roles at companies including Twitter, Affirm, and Facebook. Cho has spent his entire career working with ai, starting with his first job after finishing graduate school at Google, where he trained language models.
ai has long been used to optimize things like ads and personalized recommendations, but generative ai represents a change because of how well it can generate content. The Tofu team started thinking about use cases from a business perspective.
“Marketing is the most obvious, as they generate a lot of content to generate demand and drive campaigns,” Cho says. “There is a lot of content in marketing in general. “We believe that regardless of what Tofu does, the way teams create content is going to change.”
Between jobs at Google and Facebook, Cho began working at a startup, where he experienced the pain points of marketing. “As an entrepreneur, marketing is not easy. You have to find a way to sell and promote your services. But there are many marketing tools. I always had a great fascination with how to get a better return on investment. “There has to be a better way to optimize and utilize all of these channels.”
Ahead of the launch, Tofu’s spoke with over 100 enterprise CMOs. Many are in charge of teams that need to create thousands, or even tens of thousands, of content, including landing pages, emails, SDR sequences, e-books, case studies, and brochures. They complained that even with all their tools (some use up to 30), they don’t have the resources to hyperscale campaigns.
Tofu founders Elaine Zelby, Honglei Liu and Eunjoon (EJ) Cho
Cho says that the fragmentation of the tools and the teams that manage them means that messaging is also fragmented. For example, a company could send an email with a link to a landing page that was created separately and sounds different.
Tofu wants to solve that problem by replacing all the different tools teams use for content and generating personalized content at scale while keeping it on message and serving as a unified platform for marketing teams.
Tofu gets its name from the “top of the funnel” (ToFu), a marketing term that means the first part of the conversion, when many potential customers are first introduced to a brand or product. The startup is called that because marketing teams use many tools, which Tofu wants to replace, during the ToFu stage to target specific content and channels.
One of the ways Tofu seeks to ensure its ai-generated content sounds natural and on-brand is by first creating a Playbook, or ai knowledge graph, for its clients. It does this by scraping clients’ websites and marketing materials. Then use that data to create three sections. The first is company information, including products and brands such as logos, fonts, and colors. The second part is objectives, or segmented customer data such as personas, industries, and accounts, which is further broken down by elements such as pay-per-click (PPC) campaign stages. This helps Tofu customers personalize their content. The last part is assets, or a group of files that can be reused. This may include past webinars, podcasts, or user research studies that are used collectively as a “factory” to create content.
Tofu UI
Once a Playbook is created and potential customers are identified, Tofu builds on it to create personalized campaigns. “If (a potential lead) clicks on a link, they go to a landing page specific just for them. It could be highly customized at the account level,” says Cho. “But they can be different things. It can be at the person level, so you have very personalized messages for different people and your goal. It could be in all industries. “We have run campaigns in 20 different industries.”
Cho says the goal of the Playbook is to ensure that the content generated by Tofu needs the least amount of human interaction, since the campaigns it generates are very large. “Imagine you are literally creating 1,000 landing pages targeting these accounts. We want to make sure it’s good by default. Therefore, we try very hard to make sure the quality of the result is good, which we call “good by default” and “ready to ship by default”. But we always give users the opportunity to check it.” Tofu integrates with campaign execution tools like Hubspot and Marketo, so teams can run campaigns created by Tofu on the platform of their choice.
TOai-in-marketing” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”> Boston Consulting Group study shows that 67% of CMOs surveyed have already started using generative ai, and the convergence of marketing and ai is a space that more startups are participating in. Marketing teams can also create features that enable content creation for campaign execution tools like Hubspot. Cho says Tofu’s differentiator from its competitors is its core features like the Playbook. “Marketers already have a lot of data, from their positioning, their messaging, their competitive advantage and their segmentation. It is not necessary to enter all that. You just need to load the existing data and the ai analyzes it very well.”
He added that Tofu’s other strengths include positioning, as it has focused on businesses from the beginning. “There are many companies that will help individual entrepreneurs or small and medium-sized businesses, but we want to create workflow integrations, like secure access controls, so that software marketing teams can truly use Tofu as a resource for all their marketing content and use it, do it on a regular basis.”
