AI-based marketing start-up, Pixis (formerly Pyxis One) has raised $100 million Series C from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 along with the participation of General Atlantic, Celesta Capital, Premji Invest, and Chiratae Ventures.
Pixis has raised a total of $124 million to date since its inception in 2018. The company will leverage the fresh funds to rapidly scale its AI platforms and plugins, as well as accelerate expansions across India, North America, and Europe. Pixis will also focus to hire talent in India to increase the team size in the country, Neel Pandya, CEO, APAC, Pixis told BusinessLine.
“We’re accelerating expansions in APAC, Europe, and North America, and the funds will also help us strengthen our unique AI infrastructure and greatly speed up our tech development timelines,” he added.
Founded by Shubham A Mishra (Global CEO), Vrushali Prasade (CTO), and Harikrishna Valiyath (CBO), the Pixis AI infrastructure leverages self-evolving neural networks to empower its customers with AI-powered decision-making. Looking ahead, Pixis aims to add over 200 customisable self-evolving AI models to the infrastructure it offers and has already introduced close to four dozen AI models since its last funding. Currently, the start-up serves customers like HDFC Bank, Livspace, Bajaj Auto, ITC, DBS, Maxlife, and Swiggy among others.
“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. We are excited to partner with Shubham and the team to support their mission to make marketing data-backed, intelligent, agile, and effortlessly scalable in the new cookie-less world,” said Priya Saiprasad, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.
Investor-exit
One of the company’s early investors, Exifinity Partner Ventures, has taken a partial exit with this funding round. Exfinity will be exiting the company with earnings of 37x on their initial investment. “Exfinity has been one of our strongest supporters since the very beginning. With this being their partial exit, Exfinity will continue to maintain significant holding in Pixis. As a partner, they have been instrumental in helping us reach our inflection point which aided us in signing our first major customer. And we’re glad the story still lives on,” said Pandya.
Further, talking about the impact of the pandemic, he noted that after the very first lockdown, as the company began to have more clarity and the world adjusted to being completely online and remote, Pixis’ business picked up immensely.
“Covid-19 pandemic has revolutionised the way businesses work. Today any and every business has the potential to provide services and grow digitally. Consumers’ turned towards online to purchase products of their daily means which eventually led to an additional boom in the global e-commerce industry including edtech, fintech and foodtech, primarily. As, maximising ROI with minimal resources became the centre of focus for the marketers’. Pixis’ AI infrastructure has been able to empower businesses across the domains to work around their ways during the pandemic smartly and swiftly,” Pandya added.