SAN FRANCISCO — Different has debuted from stealth and launched an AI marketing system that runs end-to-end demand generation for lean marketing teams. The company is backed by a $48 million seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners. With Different, marketers set the strategy, and the system builds and runs campaigns across channels, tailors them to each target buyer and shifts spend toward what works.
AI has made individual marketing tasks faster, but running a campaign end to end still requires teams to manually coordinate work across many tools and channels. Once a campaign is live, teams also struggle to understand what is working, making it harder to know where to invest more and where to spend less.
Different’s three co-founders saw the same problem from various sides. Ajeet Singh, Different’s co-founder and CEO, saw it while building ThoughtSpot, where, like most companies at its stage, a strong marketing team of about 50 people worked across dozens of tools. Abhishek Pani, chief product officer, saw it at Adobe, where he led the machine-learning team behind Adobe’s marketing products and its own marketing. Abhinav Yajurvedi, chief technology officer, saw it at consumer scale, building marketing infrastructure for Flipkart and Myntra.
“We built Different so a marketing team of five can do the work of 50,” said Singh. “Marketers own the strategy and the creative ideas. Different turns them into campaigns and keeps learning and optimizing as they run, so companies can grow faster without wasting spend.”
Unlike general-purpose LLMs, point solutions or agencies, Different builds and runs the whole campaign in one closed loop. It plans each campaign, creates and launches the ads, emails and landing pages, and delivers answer engine optimization (AEO), from monitoring to content recommendation and creation.
It works from a shared memory of each company’s strategy, brand and results, keeps improving campaigns while they run, and applies what it learns on one channel to the others and to future campaigns. Marketers review and approve all work before it goes live.
Customers are already seeing results. In one month, Different customer Motif’s three-person marketing team went from running a single campaign at one time to more than a dozen across four channels. Another customer, Descope, used Different to identify and redirect 60% of paid spend that was being wasted on poor targeting, helping the team reach better-fit accounts and improve meeting rates for their sales team.
“Different has helped us scale our marketing without scaling our team,” said Abhi Iyer, Head of Marketing at Descope. “Two of us run as many as ten programs at once, each delivering the right message to the right buyer at the right time. Before Different, this level of output would have required a much bigger team.”
“At General Catalyst, we bet on ambitious teams tackling big markets,” said Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst. “Different is going after one of the largest opportunities in AI: changing how companies market. We believe Ajeet, Abhishek and Abhinav have the track record and technical depth to build something special in this category.”
Together Fund, Haystack Ventures, MXV Capital and Firebolt Ventures also participated in the round. Different will use the funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams.
