Different Emerges From Stealth With $48 Million

SAN FRANCISCO &&num;8212&semi; Different has debuted from stealth and launched an AI marketing system that runs end-to-end demand generation for lean marketing teams&period; The company is backed by a &dollar;48 million seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners&period; 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&period;&NewLine;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&period; 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&period;&NewLine;Different&&num;8217&semi;s three co-founders saw the same problem from various sides&period; Ajeet Singh, Different&&num;8217&semi;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&period; Abhishek Pani, chief product officer, saw it at Adobe, where he led the machine-learning team behind Adobe&&num;8217&semi;s marketing products and its own marketing&period; Abhinav Yajurvedi, chief technology officer, saw it at consumer scale, building marketing infrastructure for Flipkart and Myntra&period;&NewLine;&&num;8220&semi;We built Different so a marketing team of five can do the work of 50,&&num;8221&semi; said Singh&period; &&num;8220&semi;Marketers own the strategy and the creative ideas&period; Different turns them into campaigns and keeps learning and optimizing as they run, so companies can grow faster without wasting spend&period;&&num;8221&semi;&NewLine;Unlike general-purpose LLMs, point solutions or agencies, Different builds and runs the whole campaign in one closed loop&period; 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&period;&NewLine;It works from a shared memory of each company&&num;8217&semi;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&period; Marketers review and approve all work before it goes live&period;&NewLine;Customers are already seeing results&period; In one month, Different customer Motif&&num;8217&semi;s three-person marketing team went from running a single campaign at one time to more than a dozen across four channels&period; Another customer, Descope, used Different to identify and redirect 60&percnt; 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&period;&NewLine;&&num;8220&semi;Different has helped us scale our marketing without scaling our team,&&num;8221&semi; said Abhi Iyer, Head of Marketing at Descope&period; &&num;8220&semi;Two of us run as many as ten programs at once, each delivering the right message to the right buyer at the right time&period; Before Different, this level of output would have required a much bigger team&period;&&num;8221&semi;&NewLine;&&num;8220&semi;At General Catalyst, we bet on ambitious teams tackling big markets,&&num;8221&semi; said Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst&period; &&num;8220&semi;Different is going after one of the largest opportunities in AI&colon; changing how companies market&period; We believe Ajeet, Abhishek and Abhinav have the track record and technical depth to build something special in this category&period;&&num;8221&semi;&NewLine;Together Fund, Haystack Ventures, MXV Capital and Firebolt Ventures also participated in the round&period; Different will use the funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams&period;&NewLine;

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