DataSine raises $5.2M led by Pentech and Propel for its AI content-marketing platform

By now, most of us should be familiar with the concept of the tailored news feed. Right now my Facebook feed (yes, I’m still there, alas) has been messed up because I’ve clicked on too many posts about Brexit, but I digress. My point is that content has long since fallen to the tyranny of tailoring and personalization, and content marketing (that stuff that marketers like to pass off as editorial) is a big business. Making that content so enthralling as to be practically addictive is the aim of this industry, but right now all those poor copywriters have to do a lot of manual heavy lifting. Such is their burden.

This is the problem DataSine is trying to address by tailoring content to the reader’s personality. It does this by applying machine learning to behavioral data they hold about that person, whether it be customer profiles or whatever.

The idea is that marketers then make more informed decisions about what content they push out, and thus can spend more time being creative rather than spending time on writing, tweaking and A/B testing.

DataSine has now raised $5.2 million in a Series A round led by U.K.-based VC Pentech Ventures and Propel Venture Partners. Other investors include C.Entrepreneurs/Cathay Innovation, Twin Ventures and Sistema_VC. Customers include BNP Paribas and the Tinkoff bank. DataSine claims it has helped achieve uplifts of up to 80 percent in engagement and 71 percent in sales.

DataSine’s content-personalization platform is called Pomegranate. The company says it provides an AI-powered content-editing platform to guide marketers in tailoring a range of content elements, including words and images. The idea is that it will personalize everything from emails and landing pages to call center scripts. Pomegranate will launch in March, and it integrates with CRMs like HubSpot and email platforms like MailChimp.

Founder and CEO Igor Volzhanin says he launched DataSine after moving to London to do a PhD in psychology because he believed “that personality can help companies understand their customers as a whole… and move beyond the traditional focus of click optimization.”

According to Boston Consulting Group, personalization is worth an extra $800 billion in business to the 15 percent of companies that manage to get it right.

Marc Moens, a partner at Pentech, commented that “DataSine is particularly well-positioned to bring psychology and AI to address contemporary marketing challenges. The idea that digital communications can be tailored for an individual in the age of Big Data is very appealing and addresses the needs of the market.”

The company’s competitors include Meniga, The Signal Open Data Platform, Adapti, Textio, Crobox VisualDNA and Hello Soda. But Volzhanin says their approach differs from most of these in using a single customer profile, collaborative AI and a psychological approach. “We bring together AI and psychology to provide our recommendations. We do a lot of proprietary, cutting edge research to understand what kind of content different people like and use AI to power Pomegranate to provide these recommendations to marketers,” he told me.

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