California-based Pixis (formerly known as Pyxis One), a leading provider of contextual codeless AI infrastructure for complete marketing optimisation, has secured $100 million in Series C funding. Pixis will leverage the fresh funds to help the company rapidly scale its AI platforms and plugins, as well as accelerate expansions across North America, Europe and India.

The Series C round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from new investor General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm. Existing investors Celesta Capital, Premji Invest, and Chiratae Ventures also participated in the round. This round has enabled Pixis’ early investor Exfinity Venture Partners to make a partial exit with 37X returns. The venture funds have brought out the stake held by Exfinity. With the close of its $17 million Series B round just four months prior, Pixis has raised a total of $124 million to date since its inception in 2018.

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 over 100 customers worldwide with AI-powered decision-making. Having witnessed a 600 percent growth since its inception, today Pixis claims it is uniquely poised to disrupt marketing to make it more agile and data-backed, especially in a world that is speedily heading towards a cookieless web.

The SoftBank Vision Fund 2 investment in Pixis confirms that in a cookieless world, Artificial Intelligence could be the big differentiating factor for brands.

Priya Saiprasad, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers said, "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.”

Shubham Mishra continued, “The web going cookieless, in conjunction with decreasing access to the depth of data that was previously available, is a worrisome situation for marketers. In this environment, it is self-evolving neural networks that are proving to be invaluable assets in countering the disruptions to the marketing landscape. We’re excited to partner with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and General Atlantic to make codeless AI infrastructure accessible to every market in the world.”

Customers using the Pixis AI infrastructure have witnessed a 20 percent decrease in acquisition costs on average, in addition to at least 300 hours of manual work saved per month. The company's codeless AI infrastructure currently comprises over four-dozen proprietary AI models that are deployed across an ecosystem of products and plugins.

The alluring factor for customers, however, is the prospect of activating AI in 8 seconds without having to write a single line of code.

“Pixis is on a rapid growth trajectory and the fresh funds will help us far exceed our timelines for that”, said Neel Pandya, the company’s APAC CEO. “Especially with the introduction of our unique AI plugin, we’ve recorded enormous growth and retention with our current customer base. Our immediate focus will be to hire talent in India as we’re looking to more than double our team size here.”

Looking ahead, Pixis aims to add over 200 customizable self-evolving AI models to the infrastructure it offers and has already introduced close to four dozen AI models since its last funding. And now, with the $100 million Series C funding, Pixis is all set to fast-track tech and AI development.

First Published:Jan 20, 2022 5:06 PM IST