• Ukrainian AI-powered marketing campaign manager Ability AI raises a USD 1.1M Pre-Seed round
• The startup offers a suite of AI agents covering all stages of developing and navigating marketing campaigns
• The investment will be used to hire more talent and finalize and finetune the product before the public launch

This June, Ukrainian martech Ability AI announced having closed a Pre-Seed round of investment. The amount of the round is USD 1.1M, and the lead investor of the round is the well-known Ukrainian fund SMRK VC (invested in Prengi, among others). A whole constellation of angel investors also participated in the round.

The Challenge of Building Marketing Campaigns for SMEs

Eugene Vyborov is a serial entrepreneur with two exits behind his belt. In 2023, he enlisted the help of seasoned engineering leader Oleksiy Osypenko to tackle the growing marketing paradox.

On the one hand, paid marketing campaigns often feel like a black box, from defining the right campaign strategy to continuous engagement and ongoing improvements required to get it right. On the other hand, the desire to automate the processes often collides with unpleasant experiences with poorly designed solutions, and a lack of understanding of AI tools` management and control.

The problem is particularly acute for SMEs that cannot afford marketing teams and large budgets for trial and failure.

‘The company’s product focuses on empowering SMEs, an underserved niche, with cutting-edge technology,’ SMRK VC’s partner Vlad Tislenko states.

‘The problem they are solving is massive, and we experienced it first hand in our last company. I was simply dying for someone to solve this ages-old problem of getting very smart with marketing and scaling the marketing team with AI Agents,’ angel investor Anthony Venus agrees.

The global spending on martech solutions is  estimated to reach USD 215B per year by 2027. ‘Marketing is one of the most dynamic industries, where AI agents have significant potential to boost productivity,’ Mr Tislenko is convinced.

A Trusted AI Partner for Marketing

What Ability AI brings to the table is a suite of interconnected human-friendly AI agents for every stage of a marketing campaign. First, the Strategy Agent helps develop the campaign strategy including target audience hypotheses, value propositions, and optimal channels. It researches the client’s website and suggests experiments to validate and discover new audiences. Then, another AI agent can create landing pages and product pages based on the assets and creatives uploaded by the client. The outcomes get analyzed to suggest adjustments and improvements. The platform analyzes the whole process and provides detailed abna;ytics for the client’s better understanding of the processes and can suggest more experiments.

‘Users can retain as much control as they want. But as their trust for our Agents gets reassured, all the experiments can run on autopilot,’ Mr Vyborov underlines.

As of now, Ability AI’s platform is in the beta testing stage, and the investment will be used to finalize the product. Namely, it will help the company to expand the team and actively hire new talent in development and prompt engineering. The expanded team will facilitate the product development and the public release of the platform for clients in the US and Europe.