The Needle founding team with CEO Kiyan Foroughi
Singapore-based AI marketer Needle has closed a US$1.2 million oversubscribed pre-seed round led by local accelerator Iterative.
Ethos Fund and Goldbell Financial Services, besides angels, including Rainforest Founder JJ Chai, also participated.
The startup will use the funds to expand its team, including data scientists, AI trainers, and engineers.
“It’s never been easier to start a business, and it’s also never been harder to grow one. New brands need to find customers on multiple channels and transact with them on multiple platforms. On average, they are using over ten tools which is also a lot of data to make sense of and a lot of decisions to make. At Needle, we want to help founders cut through the noise, make sense of their data, and point them where to focus,” said Kiyan Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder of Needle.
Also Read: AI revolution in marketing: Transforming the way businesses connect with customers
Needle was founded by seasoned e-commerce entrepreneurs and operators, including Foroughi. A serial entrepreneur, Foroughi previously founded Electric8. He is also a seed investor at Ometria. He was earlier Managing Director at Shopee (Sea Group).
It is an end-to-end AI marketer for the founders of rising brands, which are often resource-constrained and spend up to US$3,000 monthly for generic marketing campaigns with little to no ROI.
The startup begins by helping founders generate ideas, determines business and marketing priorities, and then provides personalised recommendations for effective tactics. From creating emails to preparing and launching ad campaigns, Needle streamlines the process using generative AI.
E-commerce brands first connect data from platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, and Facebook Ads to Needle, which then sets goals and personalised tactics. The tactics recommended are taken from a database of proven marketing strategies and campaigns used at the world’s largest brands.
Also Read: How Shopee uses AI, data to build a marketing strategy that suits changes in user behaviour
The platform then takes action quicker and uses generative AI to create marketing campaigns and assets.
According to the startup, early customers who have implemented at least three Needle tactics have grown their baseline revenue to 1.5x over five months.
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