Pitch Deck: AI Startup Pomo Raised $4.5 Million for Marketing Platform

Marketers have to sift through mountains of data as they try to make their ads perform better. A new startup, Pomo, is using AI to help.

Pomo shared exclusively with CMO Insider that it had raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Databricks Ventures, Seven Stars, SV Angel, Timeless Partners, and 645 Ventures.

It also got angel investments from Scott Belsky, who led product at Adobe; Mehdi Ghissassi, the past product head of DeepMind and Google Brain; and Massimo Mascaro, formerly of Google AI.

Pomo — whose name is a riff on post-modern advertising — is a tool that plugs into major ad platforms like Google Ads, Meta, and TikTok, as well as CRM software (which manages a company’s interactions with customers) like HubSpot.

It works in the background, tracking a brand’s activity as well as competitors’ ad activity and product launches, and scanning social media platforms for relevant trends.

Pomo then displays a briefing that summarizes performance and suggests opportunities to act on. For example, Pomo might report that a competitor’s product was trending on TikTok and Reddit and suggest different ways the user could tweak their ads to react.

“The key way we pitch it to everyone is, rather than them having to do a lot of stuff manually on their back end, our platform can do everything for them before they even wake up,” said Praneet Dutta, CEO of Pomo. Dutta cofounded Pomo with CTO Joe Cheuk, a fellow Google alum.

Pomo can also generate a new campaign for the marketer to tweak or approve, using the brand’s creative material and style requirements, though the founders said creative isn’t their main focus.

Pomo is targeting small, fast-growing companies, particularly in consumer packaged goods, wellness, and hospitality, that have a marketing budget of $1 million and up.

The startup’s subscription-based model starts at $58 a month, with higher-priced tiers that offer more services, such as the ability for an agency to manage multiple brands’ ad performance simultaneously. Dutta said some marketers have told them they like the idea of having a tool that they can control themselves, rather than outsourcing the work to an agency.

Pomo’s founders know there are tons of marketing tech companies, from Adobe to Salesforce, competing for budgets. They say their point of difference is that their tool works in the background to proactively make recommendations, while many competitors rely on user prompts. They say Pomo also learns as it goes, so it gets better over time.

Six-person Pomo plans to use the funding to grow its engineering and applied AI team, improve the product, and bring on more clients.

Check out the pitch deck Pomo used to secure its $4.5 million seed investment, shared exclusively with CMO Insider.