Pixis raises USD 100 mn funding from SoftBank, others

California-based technology company Pixis (formerly known as Pyxis One) on Thursday said it has raised USD 100 million (about Rs 743.8 crore) in funding, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

The Series C round also saw participation from new investor General Atlantic, and existing investors Celesta Capital, Premji Invest, and Chiratae Ventures, a statement said. This round has enabled Pixis’ early investor Exfinity Venture Partners to make a partial exit, it added. In a separate statement, Exfinity Venture Partners announced the sale of 2.54 per cent of its holding in Pixis to existing institutional investors.

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“Exfinity has earned a stellar multiple of 37x from Pixis and are returning close to 30 per cent of the total corpus of their fund. With the partial exit, Exfinity will continue to maintain significant holding in Pixis,” it added. Pixis, which had closed a USD 17 million Series B round four months ago, has raised a total of USD 124 million to date. Pixis will leverage the fresh funds to help the company rapidly scale its AI platforms and plugins, as well as accelerate expansions across North America, Europe, and India, the statement said.

Founded in 2018, by Shubham A Mishra (Global CEO), Vrushali Prasade (CTO) and Harikrishna Valiyath (CBO), Pixis provides codeless AI infrastructure to enable customers to scale accurate data-driven marketing. It has a team of over 300 professionals. The company’s customers include HDFC Bank, Swiggy, ITC, Van Heusen, Star India, Epigamia, GIVA, Pharmeasy, UTI, Tata Consumers Limited, Welspun, Livspace, Bajaj, DBS and others.

Mishra said the web is going cookieless, in conjunction with decreasing access to the depth of data that was previously available, is a worrisome situation for marketers. “In this environment, it is self-evolving neural networks that are proving to be invaluable assets in countering the disruptions to the marketing landscape. We’re excited to partner with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and General Atlantic to make codeless AI infrastructure accessible to every market in the world,” he added.

Pixis aims to add over 200 customisable self-evolving AI models to the infrastructure it offers and has already introduced close to four dozen AI models since its last funding. “Pixis is on a rapid growth trajectory and the fresh funds will help us far exceed our timelines for that. Especially with the introduction of our unique AI plugin, we’ve recorded enormous growth and retention with our current customer base. Our immediate focus will be to hire talent in India as we’re looking to more than double our team size here,” Pixis APAC CEO Neel Pandya said.

Marketing is one of the largest spending categories for companies but many of its decisions are still driven by intuition rather than data,” Priya Saiprasad, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said.

“Pixis has developed an end-to-end codeless AI infrastructure, that equips teams with cutting-edge data science to automate and improve core processes, from budget allocation to real-time campaign optimisation and reporting. We are excited to partner with Shubham and the team to support their mission to make marketing data-backed, intelligent, agile, and effortlessly scalable in the new cookie-less world, Saiprasad added.