Conversion, an AI-driven marketing automation startup founded five years ago by two UC Berkeley dropouts, has secured $28 million in a Series A funding round led by Abstract, with participation from True Ventures and HOF Capital. Their founding story sounds like it could have been an episode of HBO’s “Silicon Valley. ” It all began when co-founder and CEO Neil Tewari, now 24, was still in high school. He was caught watching a TechCrunch Disrupt livestream during class, sent to the principal’s office, and kept late after school. Not wanting to tell his parents the reason for the late pickup, he instead called a close family friend. During the ride home, Tewari shared his newfound entrepreneurial interests. “I told him I had this interest [in entrepreneurship], and four years later, he was actually the first person to write us a check into the company, ” Tewari explained to TechCrunch. James Jiao, Tewari’s college roommate at Berkeley and now Conversion’s co-founder and CTO, also aspired to start a company. Together, they experimented with various products, such as one to help marketers purchase product placement ads. The inspiration for Conversion came when they signed up for HubSpot to assist with marketing tasks and decided to build additional automation features layered on top of it. “It was originally for us, ” Tewari said about their startup's technology. They enjoyed creating their internal marketing tool so much that they began exploring the possibility of selling it, reaching out to marketing executives for “customer discovery” interviews. “We actually spent like two months doing about 160 customer interviews with VPs of marketing from companies with 50 to 500 employees, and got a much more positive response than we could have imagined, ” Tewari recalled. Marketing teams had these tools deeply embedded in their workflows but commonly expressed frustrations with the parts they couldn’t automate. They had discovered their business idea. Introduced to more marketing executives by the family friend, they successfully raised a $2 million seed round. At 19, the founders dropped out of college to focus full time on Conversion. They managed their funds so frugally that they lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with five other roommates—two people per room, with some sleeping on couches and even in a closet. While developing their product, ChatGPT emerged.

Many legacy marketing automation tools began adding AI and chat features, but not all supported full integration. Marketing teams desired “enriching contacts, automating workflows, ” Tewari noted. Conversion integrated AI deeply, enabling features like lead organization and automated personalized follow-up emails. With growing interest in AI, the company’s prospects have risen. Over the past two years, Conversion is nearing $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), Tewari stated. About 90% of its customers are midsize businesses that have replaced legacy apps. Of course, Conversion operates in a crowded market. Apart from established tools like HubSpot, Adobe Marketo, or Salesforce Pardot, there are AI-native startups such as Jasper, Writer AI, Iterable, Copy. ai, and others. Still, Tewari maintains classic Silicon Valley founder confidence despite the competition. His strategy focuses on targeting businesses using older marketing tools rather than new startups selecting tools for the first time. The company has raised $30 million total across seed and Series A rounds, the CEO confirmed. Their success has improved living conditions for the founders, who now have separate apartments with their own rooms, and no roommates sleeping in closets.