Bengaluru: Serial entrepreneur Ajeet Singh, co-founder of Nutanix and ThoughtSpot, has launched his third venture, Different, an artificial intelligence-powered marketing technology startup that has raised $48 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst. Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated.
Singh has teamed up with Abhishek Pani, a former executive at Asana, and Abhinav Yajurvedi, former chief technology and product officer at PharmEasy, who have joined as co-founders. The startup has teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru.
Different is focused on automating demand generation for business-to-business marketing teams. The AI platform is designed to manage marketing activities including planning, content creation, execution and distribution across channels. It uses business context, marketing strategy and target audience information provided by users to generate personalised content, and analyses campaign results to adjust its approach, the company said.
Before its public launch, Different tested its services with early customers, including the software companies Descope and Motif. Singh studied at IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta and worked at Oracle, Honeywell and PwC before co-founding Nutanix in 2009. ThoughtSpot has raised more than $670 million in funding and was last valued at about $4.5 billion. Investors say AI marketing tools can cut costs for companies, though their effectiveness shows only in real use. Different has not disclosed its valuation. With teams in Bengaluru and San Francisco, the startup will face rising competition in India's fast-growing AI space. Singh's earlier ventures — Nutanix, which listed on the Nasdaq in 2016, and ThoughtSpot — give the new company a track record to lean on as it approaches enterprise buyers.