Ajeet Singh, one of the most successful Indian-origin founders in Silicon Valley, has launched his third company, betting that artificial intelligence can do much of the work of a modern marketing department.
Singh, who co-founded cloud computing company Nutanix and founded analytics firm ThoughtSpot, has unveiled Different, an AI marketing startup that emerged from stealth with $48 million (about ₹453 crore) in seed funding, Inc42 reported on Thursday, October 22. The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The size of the round is notable. A $48 million seed round is unusually large, even by Silicon Valley standards, and reflects both investor confidence in Singh's track record and the intense interest in AI applications for business.
What Different does
In a LinkedIn post, Singh described the company's purpose: "Different is an AI marketing system that runs demand generation end-to-end for lean B2B marketing teams."
The platform plans, creates, executes and scales personalised content across channels, based on a company's business context, strategy, audience and other parameters set by users. It learns from campaign results and adjusts to improve performance.
Different is targeting problems that many business-to-business companies face: the difficulty of hiring specialised marketing talent, the cost and complexity of working with multiple outside agencies, and the challenge of managing a scattered set of marketing software tools. By automating much of this work, the company aims to let small marketing teams achieve the output of much larger ones.
Before its public launch, Different tested its service with early corporate customers, including software companies Descope and Motif.
The founding team
Singh's co-founders are Abhishek Pani, a former executive at work management company Asana, and Abhinav Yajurvedi, previously the chief technology and product officer at PharmEasy. The company has teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, according to its website, a structure common among Indian-origin founders building global software companies.
A founder with two big wins
Singh's career is one of the most celebrated among Indian technology entrepreneurs abroad. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta, he worked at Oracle, Honeywell and PwC before co-founding Nutanix in 2009. Nutanix, which pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure that combines computing and storage, listed on the Nasdaq in 2016 and became one of the leading enterprise cloud companies.
Singh stepped down from Nutanix in 2012 and launched ThoughtSpot the same year. ThoughtSpot, which offers AI-powered analytics that let business users search their data in natural language, has raised more than $670 million and was last valued at nearly $4.5 billion.
Different is his third venture, and it moves him from data infrastructure and analytics into marketing applications.
The AI marketing opportunity
Marketing is one of the business functions most directly affected by generative AI. AI models can now write copy, create images and video, personalise messages for different audiences, and analyse campaign performance. Companies across the marketing technology industry are racing to incorporate these capabilities.
The shift is particularly significant for B2B marketing, where companies need to produce large volumes of content, from blog posts and white papers to emails and social media updates, to generate leads. Many smaller companies struggle to maintain consistent, high-quality output.
