Large companies often have to produce marketing campaigns with thousands of pieces of individual content, including email and social media ads. This means creative teams have to execute ideas rapidly while responding quickly to what content is getting the most clicks. Rocketium’s platform automates much of the process, and its clients include McDonald’s, Amazon and Tokopedia. The Palo Alto-based company announced today that it has raised $5.3 million in new funding led by Tenacity Ventures, with participation from returning investors Emergent Ventures, 1Crowd and Blume Ventures.
When TechCrunch covered Rocketium’s last round of funding in July 2021, it was focused on serving startups, including many unicorns, says founder and CEO Satej Sirur. Then the funding winter came and many curtailed their plans, so Rocketium shifted its focus to large enterprises. At first it was primarily a design scaling product, but now has more project management and analytics tools.
Rocketium’s analytics breaks down designs by their individual elements and let teams see what gets higher clickthrough rates. For example, it can give detailed feedback like “Creatives should have 40-50% clean space and no more than 3 products,” or “Copy should be in sentence case. This improves readability.” It can also analyze the impact of things like copy, layouts, colors and product mix on clickthrough, taking the guesswork out of decisions like whether to use antique white or cadet blue in a design.
Sirur says he was inspired by developer tools. “I come from the software world where you have automated tests, you have compilers, all of them are doing most of the work for people,” he said. “Nobody’s going and using character-by-character tools. But in the marketing world, something like that does not exist. We have built an interesting thing to solve this specific problem, which is like a compiler or automated tests that exist in the dev world. You can automatically deconstruct a creative and run a whole bunch of rules.”
Rocketium has also been investing in generative AI. At first it built models for individual clients, before working on a general purpose model that can be trained for different companies based on their past creative content, brand guidelines and performance. Users can tell Rocketium’s generative AI tools what channel they are creating content for, what its objective is and what tone they want it to have. The software produces drafts, evaluate and rewrite briefs, rephrase language and tell teams if their content is diverse and inclusive enough.
Sirur said the scale of campaigns produced by Rocketium is typically tens of thousands of pieces of content in a month. Companies use Rocketium for website and app content, in addition to marketing campaigns. Some use Rocketium to produce physical content, including posters, for retail stores. One of Rocketium’s largest customers used it to produce 100,000 pieces of content per month during their largest sale period.
Rocketium’s main competitor is Adobe, which has been expanding its capabilities with acquisitions like Omniture for analytics and Workfront for project management. Sirur says Rocketium’s advantage is the ability to handle many different parts of the design lifecycle, including project management, analytics and discussions, in one platform without teams having to use multiple software like Asana, Google Drive and email.
Since last year, Rocketium’s enterprise revenue has grown from one million to two million. It now has a team of 65 people. Its latest funding will be used to hire more people who have experience working with large enterprises, and for its expansion in the United States.
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