Minerva Launches AI Marketing Platform With $20 Million Funding
Minerva announced its public launch and raised $20 million from investors including The General Partnership, 8VC, and Topology Ventures. The Brooklyn-based startup unveiled a collaboration with OpenAI to bring AI agents to marketing teams.
The platform consolidates fragmented first-party customer data, enriches it with consumer insights, and automates marketing workflows. Minerva says customers can start using the platform within 24 hours of onboarding.
What Minerva Does
The platform includes two core tools. An Agentic Data Engineer consolidates and standardizes customer data. An Agentic Data Scientist lets marketers build predictive models through natural language prompts, using OpenAI's models to handle work that typically takes weeks in hours.
Minerva also maintains a proprietary identity graph with more than 1,000 customer attributes. Early deployments showed paid media return on ad spend improved 3.4 times, while direct mail qualified lead rates increased 2.5 times.
The company has signed more than three dozen customers, including the NBA, Juicebox, Luxury Presence, Trust & Will, and Wander. Minerva is working with the NBA to identify fan engagement opportunities.
The Founders' Background
Jackson Engles, Daniel Saedi, and Matthew Joseph founded Minerva after working in finance at Lazard, Bridgewater, and Citadel. Saedi and Joseph used alternative datasets in trading and recognized that consumer data, while valuable, remained fragmented and difficult to analyze.
"Marketing teams are under pressure to deliver better outcomes with more complexity, more channels and more data than ever before," Engles said. "Our goal is to give repetitive, operational work to AI so our customers can spend more time on the work that requires real human judgment."
What's Next
The new funding will expand Minerva's engineering, research, and sales teams. The company plans to build a self-service platform and move beyond its initial focus on sports, hospitality, and financial services into broader consumer sectors.
Phin Barnes, co-founder of The General Partnership, said context matters for AI agents. "Whoever structures the right context for a domain wins that domain," Barnes said. "Minerva is building the context layer for marketing."
For marketing professionals, this represents a shift in how teams operate. Rather than managing operational tasks, marketers direct AI agents that handle campaign creation, analysis, optimization, and reporting. Learn more about AI for Marketing and Data Analysis to understand how these tools fit into broader marketing strategy.
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