Tomi.ai Raises $1M Pre-Seed Round from Institutional Investors To Help Service Industries Acquire 2x More Customers

Palo Alto, June 24, 2021 — Tomi.ai, a predictive targeting and optimization platform that helps companies boost growth and marketing ROI by optimizing digital ads for bottom-of-funnel outcomes like sales and lifetime value (LTV), today announces it has raised a $1M Pre-Seed round. Its investors include AI-focused funds Begin Capital and the Phystech Leadership Fund (PLF).

Tomi.ai uses machine learning models that transform first-party behavioral data from websites into high-confidence predictions of business outcomes such as purchases. These predictions are then used to close feedback loops with advertising platforms, allowing any company to run efficient digital marketing campaigns that were previously only available to e-commerce. With Tomi.ai businesses can identify visitors with high intent and improve their marketing ROI and customer acquisition by 1.5–2 times through value based optimization for leads. Tomi.ai processes 30m requests a day and its revenue is growing 4-fold year-on-year.

“While working at Compass, I witnessed first-hand how limited the opportunities were for mostly offline industries with long sales cycles, such as real estate, compared to what we had in e-commerce at Ozon. Conversions are rare, acquisition costs are high, and there aren’t that many events for optimization”, says Konstantin Bayandin, founder and CEO of Tomi.ai. “I spotted a $20 bln opportunity on the $600 bln digital advertising market and built an MVP for what would become Tomi.ai, because for these industries predictive attribution and optimization are truly indispensable”.

As digital businesses were able to fully leverage advanced tools like smart bidding, companies with long and largely offline sales cycles from industries like real estate, automotive, financial services, SaaS, and many others were left behind. Until recently, they could not optimize their digital ads for ultimate business outcomes due to low conversion rates and offline nature of these outcomes. Instead, they had to optimize for leads and clicks, which resulted in exorbitant customer acquisition costs.

“The digital advertising market has long been ripe for disruption with breakthrough technologies”, Alex Menn of Begin Capital, says. “We are impressed by the team and the strong traction in a short time and see huge potential for Tomi.ai”.

“We are happy to back Konstantin in this journey to build the next-generation data-driven marketing platform. Connecting traditional sectors with high-touch sales models such as real estate, education or financial services into digital ecosystems assisted by strong machine learning capabilities is the next wave of building a digital world”, added Anton Fedorov, Managing Partner at PLF and Partner at Flashpoint Venture Capital.

“Apple is closing down IDFA tracking and Google plans to remove third-party cookies from Chrome pushing us to find new approaches to advertising. Tomi.ai helps us unlock new pockets of growth and optimize our marketing campaigns for customer acquisition and revenue, not just leads, majority of which will never make a purchase”, says Dmitry Karpov, Co-Founder & CIO of ElectroNeek, a Robotic Process Automation company and one of the customers of Tomi.ai.

The company was founded by Konstantin Bayandin, who worked as Senior Director, Digital Marketing & Technology at Compass (NYSE: COMP) and Chief Marketing Officer at Ozon (NASDAQ: OZON) where he worked on predictive modeling for digital marketing since 2015.

Tomi.ai is planning to use the funding to focus on growth. Dmitry Popov, originally an angel investor with Tomi.ai, recently joined the company as its Chief Revenue Officer. Previously, Dmitry was working as an executive at a Fortune Global 500 bank and as a McKinsey consultant.