lifecycle-marketing
(23)
Chris Hexton and the value of starting over
An invoicing idea brought Chris Hexton to Startmate. Letting it go led to Vero - and a career spent asking what customers actually need, even when the answer changes the business.
Listrak and the art of the second chance
A shopper leaves. A retailer remembers. Listrak has built a business around the delicate interval between those two events, connecting customer data with email, text and the next useful nudge.
Motimatic buys ad space for the students who went quiet
A college can win an application and still lose the student. Motimatic uses behavioral science, paid media, and carefully timed prompts to turn unfinished intentions into a next step.
The Game Studio That Put a Message in Everyone's Pocket
OneSignal began with a game studio's awkward discovery: getting people to download an app was easier than giving them a reason to return. Its answer became the plumbing behind billions of daily messages - and a lesson in when to speak, when to wait, and what a notification is worth.
The Agency That Treats Every Growth Problem Like a Rubik’s Cube
Rubix Agency built its reputation by refusing to confuse a marketing channel with a growth strategy. Its most interesting work begins when the obvious lever stops working.
The Restaurant Has One Voice. The Internet Gave It Twelve.
The Forking Group’s wager is that a restaurant’s marketing problem is rarely a shortage of posts. It is the costly jumble between the menu, the map, the camera, the inbox and the table.
Acoustic Inherited IBM’s Marketing Cloud. Now It Wants Marketers to Escape the Legacy Stack.
Born from an IBM carve-out, Acoustic is rebuilding a collection of veteran marketing tools around one sharp idea: the system that spots customer intent should also be able to act on it. The hard part is proving that a legacy inheritance can become the cure for legacy martech.
The Price Tag Behind Every Push Notification
Braze and Iterable sell the machinery behind modern customer messaging. Their pricing shows why buyers need to budget for audience, channels, data and overages - not merely software seats.
Customer.io
How a lunch-break side project for developers turned into a $100M messaging engine trusted by Notion, Buffer, and thousands of other data-driven teams.
Revamp (YC S23)
Revamp is a San Francisco startup (YC Summer 2023) that builds AI agents for eCommerce retention marketing. It plugs into Klaviyo and Shopify to turn scattered customer data into smart segments and then writes genuinely 1:1 personalized emails - drawing on signals like location, weather, purchase history and browsing behavior - so D2C brands can lift email revenue without hiring an army of copywriters.
Vero
Vero is a Sydney-based customer engagement platform that helps product-led teams send personalized email, mobile push and SMS messages triggered by what users actually do inside a product. Founded in 2012 by Chris Hexton and James Lamont, Vero pairs a real-time behavioural workflow engine with Vero Connect, an approach that reads directly from a company's data warehouse so teams can message customers without duplicating their data into yet another marketing tool.
Stay AI
Stay AI is a Shopify-native subscription and retention platform that helps direct-to-consumer brands turn subscriptions into a growth channel rather than a simple billing tool. Founded in 2021 by ecommerce operators Gina Perrelli, Pierson Krass, and Taylor Cawiezell, the platform pairs a no-code, marketer-friendly customer portal with AI-driven churn prediction, smart dunning, cancellation surveys, and A/B testing. More than 500 brands - including OLIPOP, Magic Spoon, Momofuku, Lemme, and ARMRA - use Stay AI to reduce churn, lift recurring revenue, and increase customer lifetime value.
Gina Perrelli
Gina Perrelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands that treats subscriptions as a performance channel rather than a payment mechanism. A self-described 'retention girlie' with over a decade in lifecycle marketing, she previously co-founded the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and now leads a company that helps hundreds of DTC brands - including Olipop, Vita Coco, and Momofuku - reduce churn and grow subscriber revenue. Stay AI raised $15.1M in Series A funding and has expanded through acquisitions of RetentionEngine and Bellwethr.
Iterable
Iterable is a San Francisco-based AI customer engagement platform that lets consumer brands coordinate personalized messaging across email, SMS, push, in-app, and web from a single system. Founded in 2013 by ex-Google engineer Andrew Boni and ex-Twitter engineer Justin Zhu, it uses unified behavioral and product data plus a growing set of AI agents, branded Nova, to build, test, and optimize customer journeys in real time. The company reached a $2 billion valuation in 2021 and serves brands including DoorDash, Fabletics, HelloFresh, Redfin, and SeatGeek.
JustAI
JustAI (formerly Just Words, legally Choice AI Inc.) is a San Francisco AI-native marketing platform that turns lifecycle content into an always-on experimentation engine. Its AI agents - strategy, creative, decisioning and data - predict high-value moments, generate on-brand message variants across email, SMS and push, test them against real users, and shift traffic to the winners while compounding learnings across campaigns. Founded in 2024 by Neha Mittal (ex-Twitter and Pinterest growth lead) and Jeff Hara, the company graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and works with consumer brands including Grammarly, ClickUp, Notion, Lemonade, Coursera and Thumbtack.
Conversion
Conversion is a San Francisco AI-native marketing automation platform founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Neil Tewari and James Jiao. Built to replace legacy tools like HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot, it unifies product and CRM data, detects buying signals, and lets teams build personalized, no-code lifecycle campaigns. It serves 4,000+ companies, raised a $28M Series A led by Abstract Ventures in 2025, and is approaching eight-figure ARR.
Neha Mittal
Neha Mittal is the CEO and co-founder of JustAI (formerly Just Words), a Y Combinator W24 startup in San Francisco building an AI-first marketing engine that continuously writes, tests, and optimizes copy across email, push, SMS, and landing pages. Before founding the company in 2024, she led Retention and Growth product teams at Pinterest and Twitter, where a single notification tweak - changing "Elon tweeted" to "Elon just tweeted" - added roughly 800,000 users and planted the seed for her company. A computer engineer turned product leader, she earned a master's at UC Berkeley's School of Information and has raised about $2.2M in seed funding from Cloud Capital, Peak XV Partners, and Y Combinator.
Aampe
Aampe is a San Francisco-based company building agentic AI infrastructure for personalized customer experiences. Instead of relying on generative AI, it assigns a dedicated reinforcement-learning agent to every individual user that continuously experiments and learns what content to send, when, and whether to send anything at all. The platform has deployed over 100 million agents across hundreds of consumer apps on four continents, helping product, data science, and lifecycle marketing teams move from rule-based campaigns to continuous, per-user adaptation.
Simon AI
Simon AI, formerly Simon Data, is a New York-based marketing technology company that builds an AI-first, composable customer data platform with embedded AI agents. Its Agentic Marketing Platform lets marketing teams reason over live customer and contextual data in their own data cloud to detect signals like churn risk and demand spikes, turn messy data into campaign-ready attributes, and orchestrate personalized campaigns across channels and tools like Braze, Attentive, and Iterable. Founded in 2013 by data scientists Jason Davis and Matt Walker, the company has raised roughly $117.8M and serves fast-growing and enterprise brands including SeatGeek, Equinox, Tripadvisor, ASOS, Venmo, and BarkBox.
Paul Meinshausen
Paul Meinshausen is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a San Francisco company that deploys agentic AI infrastructure so consumer apps can learn from each user's behavior and adapt their messaging in real time. An anthropologist turned data scientist who started his career in US Army Intelligence, he co-founded the Indian fintech PaySense (acquired by PayU for $185M) before building Aampe with collaborators he first met in a military analysis unit. He argues that businesses win not by understanding the past but by making better decisions about the future, and that personalization should be about responsiveness rather than prediction.
Brett Browman
Brett Browman is a Growth Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, bringing a hands-on, ER-doctor approach to diagnosing and scaling portfolio companies. A veteran of Silicon Valley's most storied growth stories - first growth hire at both Square and Opendoor - he spent seven years as Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz advising companies like ElevenLabs, Character.ai, and Luma.ai before joining Khosla in 2024. Known for getting in the trenches as a fractional growth leader, Browman has helped shape the go-to-market playbooks of some of the fastest-growing startups in tech history.
Ashley Faus
Ashley Faus is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, a keynote speaker, Stanford instructor, and author of 'Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI' (Kogan Page, 2025). She's best known for the 'Content Playground' framework - rejecting the linear marketing funnel in favor of a non-linear, audience-driven content ecosystem. A former musical theater major turned B2B marketing strategist, she argues that trust is the one thing AI cannot automate, and has built a career proving it.
Val Geisler
Val Geisler is a lifecycle marketing strategist and VP of Partner Programs at Digioh, best known for founding Fix My Churn and creating the 'Dinner Party Strategy' — a behavior-driven email onboarding framework that has powered 209% conversion lifts for SaaS and ecommerce brands. With 12+ years at the intersection of customer empathy and marketing systems, she has built advocacy programs at Klaviyo, grown retention email to 25% of company revenue at ByHeart, and hosted the Ecommerce Marketing School podcast. Her philosophy: emails are relationships, not broadcasts.