Adxcel Rebrands as Artsai, Using AI to Consolidate the Marketing Stack

Artificial intelligence-based marketing tech company Artsai launched today in a rebrand.

Previously known as Adxcel, Artsai founder and CEO Yuri Khidekel and his team realized more than a year ago that their company was doing more than dynamic creative optimization. Artsai now has two patents pending around the AI technology, which uses machine learning to customize messaging by consolidating the marketing stack.

“The typical marketer today has five to 10 different marketing technologies that they’re using, that don’t talk to each other, they don’t share data, and they don’t leverage insights,” says Erik Lundberg, Artsai chief revenue officer, in an interview with Street Fight.

Khidekel and Lundberg say that Artsai’s adaptive marketing automation is the first and only marketing solution that is using AI to integrate insights. The technology addresses the full scope of a user’s digital journey and adapts to create more relevant messaging throughout it.

“Our technology is very unique,” Lundberg says. “We optimize the entire customer lifecycle journey. We may help someone acquire a new customer on Facebook, then reengage user on programmatic or RTB [real-time bidding], and then help drive the user to make a purchase inside the marketer’s mobile app or landing page. We learn from each interaction and adjust – it’s adaptive marketing automation. We learn from each customer interaction and then adapt and optimize the next message.”

Founded in 2011, the previous company, Adxcel, was viewed dynamically as an ad optimization company, Khidekel says. Over time, the work became much broader in focus.

“This is why we changed the name,” Khidekel says. “Advertisement is user acquisition, but it’s also solving retention issues, engagement, application. So solving a broader marketing need that is not only in advertising.”

Artsai’s interconnected AI marketing stack is able to perform multiple marketing tasks at once, including retargeting, re-engagement, app monetization and content optimization. It allows brands and publishers to adapt creative content and track audiences across different digital environments, including programmatic exchanges, social media, premium publishers and a marketer’s own digital properties. The intelligent technology maintains consistency with customers’ previous engagements with the brand.

The name Artsai is a combination of the word “art” – the creative content is still incredibly important, Khidekel says – and the word “science”.

The company recently partnered with identity resolution company LiveRamp to link hundreds of thousands of datasets. Lundberg says that Artsai uses more advanced techniques and more granular data to bring advertising to a hyperlocal level.

“For example, for a sports retailer ad in Arizona, a lot of people are interested in golf, but a lot are not,” he says. “We could use Liveramp data for that ad, and for the people who we know are into golf, we’ll show them an ad for a great set of golf clubs. Then for a person who’s interested in wakeboarding, we’ll show that customer an ad for a wakeboard. And we’re not just going to personalize the ad; each ad would be optimized. So what wakeboard? What will the headline be?”

Artsai enables brands to customize landing pages to show certain products or services that users have previously shown interest in, Lundberg says.

“To show them the product and the product messaging and the call to action on the landing page is what is most likely to drive conversion,” he says. “We basically double the return that marketers get on ad and marketing spend.”

The company is already working with brands including Lyft, Pandora, LG, CBS Interactive, Amazon, and Walmart, and is generating more than $10 million in annual revenue.

“Previously, our marketers spent most of their time going back and forth between multiple platforms trying to reconcile them with each other,”  says Brian Mikalis, SVP of Monetization at Pandora, in a statement. “We were surprised to find out just how inefficient this process was when we started using Artsai. With Artsai’s complete end-to-end platform, we’ve been able to monetize and understand customers better with hyper-personal creative and data optimization, while reducing our customer acquisition and re-engagement costs.”

Artsai currently employs 23 people and will likely reach about 40 people in the next year.

April Nowicki is a staff writer at Street Fight.