CIPIO.ai completes a $1.25M pre-seed round in stealth mode to accelerate R&D for AI-Infused Customer Intelligence Platform Seasoned tech entrepreneurs and domain experts team up during this pandemic to help B2C businesses succeed in the New Hybrid Customer Experience.

CIPIO co-founders Growson Edwards (Ex-MicroPact CCO), Manoj Kumar Goyal (Ex-Marketo CPO and Ex-Oracle GVP), and Dharmesh Trivedi (Ex-Motionsoft SVP) announced the completion of their pre-seed round of $1.25M, led by DX.Partners, a pre-seed Venture Studio, with participation from the co-founders and other angel investors.





DX.Partners Founder & Managing Partner, Sundeep Sanghavi (ex-CEO & Founder of DataRPM, acquired by Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS)) is very bullish on the founders’ vision and focus on the B2C member/subscriber intelligence. “COVID-19 has accelerated the unprecedented changes in consumer behavior, causing massive disruption in the traditional brick & mortar industries like fitness, faith & spirituality, restaurants, live event venues, who now must transform digitally at an exponential pace,” said Sanghavi.



Mr. Trivedi has scaled multiple startups from zero to $100M in revenue with two exits, Razorsight acquired by Synchronoss (NASDAQ: SNCR) and MotionSoft acquired by Daxco. “We have been heads down since the pandemic working on a minimum valuable product and have made tremendous progress,” said Trivedi. With our insights and industry expertise, early adopters like Crunch Fitness, World’s Gym, and the Xponential Fitness streaming platform called GO, which operates brands like Pure Barre, Club Pilates, AKT, YogaSix, Cyclebar, Row House, Stretch Lab, and Stride have seen significant ROI.” Mr. Trivedi reached out to Growson Edwards, an advisor at that time, to methodically launch CIPIO out of stealth mode.



Mr. Edwards led MicroPact’s growth from $1M to $84M in revenue and has a knack for customer success resulting in a 106% net dollar retention. “I have launched and scaled five SaaS products across multiple markets. As an early advisor, I saw immense value in CIPIO’s IP, inspiring me to join Dharmesh and invest in the pre-seed round,” said Edwards. He quickly sought out San Francisco Bay area veteran MarTech platform executive Manoj Kumar Goyal to lead CIPIO’s R&D team.



Mr. Goyal previously led Oracle’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) team and launched the platform in a record time of 12 months. Before Oracle, Mr. Goyal served as Marketo’s Chief Product Officer, meeting the performance and scalability needs of the most demanding CMOs (such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft), and driving annual revenue growth at a 25% pace to $300m+ revenue for 5000+ customers. “Whether you are a massive franchisor or the operator of a neighborhood corner gym, a church, a restaurant, or venue, the pandemic has impacted one and all like never before. All the idling forced by the novel coronavirus has necessitated that brick & mortar businesses go digital at warp speed. What’s lost in this rapid digital transformation is understanding the customer beyond the 360-degree intelligence that traditional CDPs provide. To understand the customer journey in this new hybrid world will require unparalleled intelligence that can only be produced by combining the power of AI & domain expertise,” said Mr. Goyal.



“It’s very rare for a startup at a stealth stage to have such a strong customer validation along with a killer team,” said Sanghavi. CIPIO expects to launch commercially in Q1 of 2021 and expects to raise additional capital at that time.