Minerva raises $20M to unify consumer brand first-party data and power AI-driven marketing

Have a good one.

Let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. Do you have another AI image for me?

Or are we moving on to our next guest, Matthew Joseph from Manurva? He's a co-founder and CEO and he's in the waiting room. We'll get back to the next version after we talk to Manurva founder Matthew Joseph. How are you doing, Matthew? Good to meet you.

Good. How are you guys?

We're doing fantastically.

Uh on.

Thanks so much for hopping on. Please uh introduce yourself and the company.

Yeah, so I'm MJ. I'm the CTO co-founder of Manurva as you guys said before. Yeah,

Manurva is an AI platform for consumer marketing. So basically we help consumer brands unify their first party data which sits in like you know 20 different data systems like Clio, Shopify, whatever. Uh we standardize it, we resolve it, we create kind of a golden record. Uh and then we optimize sales and marketing on top of that

using a bunch of agents that we developed. Uh do do you uh uh how much of this is like uh data for like the CFO of a consumer brand to understand return on ad spend versus like actually taking it through to a creative tool closing the loop and integrating with like generative content writing marketing briefs maybe even generating copy probably not in your models directly but you know throughout the and harnessing everything together. Yeah, it's actually more uh data on the consumer and so we have a really really expansive data set on 27 million Americans. Okay. Including an identity graph which uh is also pretty expansive. We have about like 10 billion pieces of PII. And so we help the CMO and the performance marketer kind of understand their consumer base better.

Uh so when you're looking at the funnel and seeing where people are dropping off or you're looking at like the email copy that you're creating, you need to understand who you're actually sending that message to. We understand that. So we can kind of do it both ways, right? We could be generative and say, "Hey, you're marketing to this kind of person, so you should say this." Yeah. And then we can do the opposite where we can kind of diagnose inefficiencies based off of demographics.

What is uh g sort of a case study from the NBA like NBA is in the news obviously. Uh seems like people show up uh with plenty of money. I don't know that you need any like like what what what questions do you need other than uh what's your credit card number because I got a $100,000 ticket here for you and uh you you'll pay whatever it takes to get to this game.

Yeah. Uh with the NBA we're part of their fan graph. Uh so we power a lot of their consumer analytics that they end up uh selling to all their downstream teams. But even at the team level, there's a ton of different case studies that we are starting to prop up right now where, you know, if you have super expensive seating, but you're in Oklahoma City, uh you might need to find people that are out of town from a road game that might want to buy that seat, right? Sure.

So flavors like like case studies like that are what we're gunning for. But with the NBA in general, it's mostly powering the uh consumer analytics platform.

How do you guys actually interact with uh different ad platforms? let's say Meta or Adwords, Tik Tok, etc.

Yeah. So, with Meta, uh we'll find audiences that we know will convert at a very very high rate for specific products because we have an understanding of kind of the right demographic to market to and so it'll create lookike audiences that are seeds on meta and they'll generally outperform broad targeting by a pretty fair margin. Uh we've seen in luxury travel, uh luxury goods, our rorowaz improvements are around like 3 to 5x broad targeting. Wow. Uh how quickly can you prove to companies that the product works?

Yeah, it it depends on kind of the the case study. Uh for data, you can immediately identify uh inefficiencies in your pipeline. So people in a day will be like, "Oh, you guys are like absolutely changing where we're allocating spend." uh for things like meta, things like direct mail campaigns, it takes a little bit longer to get stat sig, but you can get uh you can get an idea of how well you're actually going to be performing pretty quickly. Uh so we generally see, you know, within a week that uh you know, our data and our audiences perform better.

Yeah. What's the what what are like the biggest broadest meta trends in consumer marketing these days? I mean, we went through like the the the Facebook direct targeting, direct response boom. We went through the influencer buy YouTube ads boom. Um, but in the age of AI, I think everyone's expecting just like AI generated ads. But is there some other trend where like you can target a smaller audience so you can go on a more niche platform so you might see more uplift from a pre a platform that previously wasn't uh ROI positive? Like what else are you seeing in terms of just broad marketing trends?

Yeah, I think a pretty interesting one right now is retargeting on AIdriven traffic.

Okay. Uh so a person who comes in through like a chat GBT platform or like claude or whatever will behave very differently than a person who came in through direct. Uh and so being able to understand that funnel is super super important. So retargeting on top of that uh is something that's pretty interesting and and kind of booming right now.

Do you have a thesis on like how or why they behave differently? Like if I

it seems like it's higher conversion. Like if I'm landing on a web page after doing a deep research report on a product, I've learned so much. So, I'm probably not going to need to scroll the product detail page. I'm probably either just want to jump to checkout or I want to do something else to verify something that I learned in the chat app.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these trends are happening kind of in the last year. And I still think the average user of AI uh especially um you know for kind of deep research is probably a little bit more advanced than the you know the the 65year-old like in Oklahoma City. I keep picking Oklahoma City so I'm sorry about that. Uh but I I think it does boil down to demographics. In three years, this can totally change, right? Like when AI is like it's truly common place in every single household, which is getting there.

Um but uh you know, over time, this will definitely change.

Yeah.

Uh what percentage of the creative that your customers are running do you think is uh heavily uh heavily generated with AI or influenced by AI or or you know created in process? Yeah, I'm seeing a huge trend towards AI generated um AI generated creative. There's a lot of like weird little things that you need to keep in mind when you're using AI generated creative like where you're placing text uh relative to the rest of uh the creative. I mean it's really hard to execute well. uh this is something that we're looking into right now as we have you know a very good read on the actual demographics and so creative is kind of the next logical piece there right in terms of

percentage like if you're going to create a lookalike audience for somebody and then you're telling them like hey you should put spend behind this you should you're also in a pretty good position to theoretically as models get better say like here's you know a hundred pieces of content that you can run against them and then they can select okay what what fits our brand what doesn't. Mhm.

Yeah, that that's exactly right. It's like the next logical step, right? Just automating the entire process from, you know, product to cohort fit to creative fit. Um, we we're in a position to do all of that. Um, and I'm I'm happy to be part of kind of like the uh the rise in in creative generated by AI.

I wonder find a lookalike audience of people that just love AI slop and you just feed them the sloppiest ads and then people that because a lot of people don't like the AI slop, but there's probably some niche audience out there that's like stop you.

I'm buying if there are six fingers.

You'll appreciate you'll appreciate this. Uh we uh obviously love ads uh firm supporters of ads, all this stuff. But somehow I ended out in like a ended up in a holdout.

Don't say this, they're going to take you

on I ended up in a hold out on Meta where I do not get any ads. Like I'm in the probably like 0.05% of people that they're like testing engagement with and I'm like I'm the wrong guy to test on. Um, but I just I just realized one day I was like, "Wait, I have not gotten an ad on on Instagram in uh months and still to this day absolutely nothing."

Imagine they run this experiment, whole hold group, no ads, and they just find like massive depression, just massive rates of depression. They're like, "We got to bring back." That'd be the most bullish for mental health.

Maybe, maybe,

you know, consumerism, shop,

talk about the round

shop therapy or whatever.

Uh, yeah. So, we raised So you raised 20 mil between the C and A uh from APC, from the general partnership, uh many other uh investors that I'm probably uh forgetting to name, but

uh very very stoked for all their support. We love all the teams we work with.

Fantastic.

Very cool. I got some brands to connect you to.

Yeah.

Uh so send me send me an email. Send me an email. I'll uh I'll uh with with the the quick pitch, I'll CC you in with some.

That'd be great.

We'll do. Awesome.

Thank you. Have a great rest of your day.

Nixon five. Let's go. Let's go.

Uh,

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or San Antonio. I feel like everyone

like I feel like it's relatively easy to rally these people in our world around New York City.

Yeah. Oh, sure, sure, sure. It's easy to be a bandwagon fan for the Knicks cuz New York you visited. You've been there.

Big Apple. Hard to really rally around San Antonio. Have you been to San Antonio?

No.

Would you like to go to San Antonio?

Sure.

Sure.

Strong.

Where is San Antonio? It's in

TVPN San Antonio.

It's in Texas.