Goldman Sachs leads $30M round for A.I. marketing firm Persado

"We are attractive to customers and that's why we are attractive to investors," Alex Vratskides^[1], CEO and co-founder of Persado, told New York Business Journal. Among the company's other customers are Microsoft, Verizon Wireless and Sears.

The company currently employs more than 200 people across nine global locations and generates cognitive content for display ads, Facebook, email, website landing pages, SMS, and mobile push notifications.

From the time it raised $15 million from Bain Capital Ventures in 2013 to a Series B in 2015^[2], Persado went from "having much fewer customers and being limited in terms of scope, to growing 100 percent year over year," Vratskides said. The proceeds are expected to strengthen the company's sales team and help it double in size over the next year, he added.

What Persado does is fuse natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to generate specific combination of words, phrases and images as a means of grabbing audience attention.

The technology improves brands with "smart content," Vratskides explained, adding that it's too early to tell whether the company will pursue M&A or file an initial public offering. Persado's story, he touted, is a multi-billion dollar one.

"We're thinking very big — no one is actually coming up from behind and trying to copy us ," he said. "We want to build as big a company as possible and use all the means at our disposal to do that."