Minerva Launches AI Platform for Marketing Teams With $20M Funding
Minerva, an AI platform built for chief marketing officers and marketing teams, launched publicly today with $20 million in funding and a collaboration with OpenAI. The platform helps brands unify fragmented customer data and run marketing campaigns using AI agents.
The funding round included The General Partnership, 8VC, Lingotto Innovation, Topology Ventures, and NBA Investments. Minerva has already signed three dozen customers, including the NBA, Juicebox, Luxury Presence, Trust & Will, and Wander.
What the platform does
Minerva allows marketers to unify first-party customer data, enrich it with consumer context from a proprietary identity graph containing more than 1,000 attributes, and build campaigns within 24 hours of onboarding.
The platform includes two AI tools built with OpenAI's frontier models like GPT-5.5. The Agentic Data Engineer profiles customer data, writes transformation SQL, and validates output-work that typically takes weeks. The Agentic Data Scientist lets marketers without machine learning experience use natural language prompts to build and deploy predictive models.
Early deployments show measurable results. Minerva has helped brands improve paid media return on ad spend by 3.4x and direct mail marketing qualified lead rates by 2.5x.
The problem Minerva solves
Most brands have valuable first-party customer data but struggle to use it effectively. Data sits in fragments across systems, lacks external context, and requires manual work to prepare for analysis.
Jackson Engles, co-founder and CEO, said in a statement: "Marketing teams are under pressure to deliver better outcomes with more complexity, more channels and more data than ever before. Minerva gives marketers the context and infrastructure to understand their customers more deeply and act on those insights faster."
The founders-Engles, Daniel Saedi, and Matthew Joseph-met at Berkeley and worked in finance at Lazard, Bridgewater, and Citadel respectively. They built Minerva after observing how fragmented datasets limit the value of alternative data in trading. They applied the same principle to marketing: better data structure unlocks better decisions.
Where the money goes
Minerva will use the funding to expand engineering and go-to-market teams, build out its self-serve platform, and move beyond its initial focus in sports, hospitality, and financial services into broader consumer categories.
For marketing professionals looking to understand how AI agents work with customer data, resources on AI for Marketing and Data Analysis cover the foundational concepts behind platforms like this.
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