Neil
Tewari

During a high school class, Neil Tewari snuck in a livestream of TechCrunch Disrupt. A teacher noticed. He was marched to the principal's office. And instead of calling his parents, he called a family friend. During the car ride home, Tewari talked about startups. That family friend listened. Four years later, that same person wrote the first check into Conversion.

That story - accidental, embarrassing, oddly perfect - is a good lens for how Neil Tewari operates. He doesn't stumble into things so much as barrel into them with enough conviction that the universe has to accommodate.

By 19, he had enrolled at UC Berkeley to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, met his future co-founder James Jiao as a roommate, and started building things in the dorm. Not class projects. Actual businesses. NFTs inside Roblox. Billboard ads inside Minecraft. An AI website builder called StyleAI. None of them stuck. All of them taught him something.

The pivot that mattered came from frustration. Tewari and Jiao were trying to grow their own startup and found themselves fighting HubSpot instead of using it. They built automation features on top of it, just for themselves. Then they wondered if anyone else had the same problem. So they started asking.

Two months. One hundred and sixty customer interviews. VPs of marketing at 50- to 500-person companies. The same complaints surfaced every time: the tools were deeply embedded, nearly impossible to leave, and consistently broken in exactly the same ways. Nobody had time to become a RevOps specialist just to run a nurture sequence.

Tewari and Jiao dropped out at 19. They raised a $2 million seed round - partly because of those 160 interviews, partly because of the family friend from the principal's office - and started building. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Five people. Two rooms. Some on couches, some in closets. They weren't trying to live the startup myth. They were just keeping costs low enough to survive long enough to build something real.

The bet paid off quickly. Revenue hit $1 million in 2023. By 2025 it was $6.5 million and climbing toward $10 million ARR. They now employ 45 people and serve over 4,000 companies - including Clay, Abacum, Paraform, Warmly, and HockeyStack. Roughly 90% of their customers arrived by switching away from legacy tools: Marketo, Pardot, the older HubSpot stack.

In July 2025, Conversion announced a $28 million Series A led by Abstract Ventures, with True Ventures, HOF Capital, and Antler joining alongside angels from OpenAI and the broader AI and go-to-market ecosystem. True Ventures put it plainly on X: "From our very first conversation, it was clear Neil and James had the kind of founder spark we look for."

What Tewari is building is not a feature. It's a replacement. Conversion is positioned as the AI-native alternative to the entire legacy marketing automation stack - a single platform that unifies email, segmentation, lead scoring, workflows, reporting, and CRM data. It connects to Salesforce, Snowflake, BigQuery, and other enterprise sources. It's SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant. The pitch to enterprise teams is simple: stop fighting your tools and let AI handle the MarOps grunt work while your team focuses on the decisions only humans should be making.

The non-marketer angle is not just a brand story - it shapes the actual product. Tewari and Jiao built Conversion from the buyer's perspective: what does a marketing team actually need, stripped of the complexity that legacy vendors layered on over fifteen years of enterprise sales cycles? The answer, they found, is a system fast enough to match the pace of modern go-to-market, smart enough to automate the repetitive, and flexible enough to connect to the data already living in a company's stack.

The journey from dorm room to $28M round to 4,000 paying customers happened in roughly five years. Tewari is 24. The company has barely started.