Please welcome Tildei, the marketing platform revolutionizing the customer-brand relationship

Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau

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Meet Tildei, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.

HQ: New York

Founder: Mark Ghermezian, Kevin Dutra, and Manisha Shah

The problem: While incumbent enterprise marketing software is built to deliver large volumes of messages, spraying customers with customer support options, it can’t handle inbound messages from customers or manage natural, two-way conversations. Inbound customer chat functions are stuck in a rusty paradigm. Today’s consumer wants more than to be the constant recipient of one-way marketing messages and “yes,” “no,” or “stop,” options. They want their brand experience to matter, and to have a meaningful connection with the brands they choose to shop with.

Tildei’s solution: Tildei enables mid-market and enterprise brands to hold meaningful marketing conversations with their customers. The company’s AI-enabled platform allows truly personal conversations to be initiated by both brands and customers, with a variety of tools to start chatting through platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. In addition to simple chats, brands can also send conversational quizzes, newsletters, product recommendations, reviews, and more. An easy-to-use, intuitive user interface combined with robust and easily implemented integration paths allows brands to effortlessly adopt conversational marketing and embrace new channels.

Origin story: Tildei was built by industry veterans Mark, Kevin, and Manisha. Prior to teaming up, Mark co-founded and served as the CEO of Braze, a lifecycle marketing platform that IPOed in November 2021. Kevin and Manisha together were founding team members for Rebel, a platform that provided interactive email and directing marketing services for brands, and which was acquired by Salesforce in 2018. With decades of combined experience developing and marketing technology, the three partnered to launch a company that would break the mold.

Why we’re betting on it: In just the past few years, as the digital transformation has continued to accelerate, the relationship consumers have with the brands they trust has evolved significantly. Consumers want more than just a place to buy products — they want real access to brands and a way of communicating that goes beyond run-of-the-mill support requests and the performative “we hear you” that so many companies offer. Tildei’s platform offers companies the opportunity to develop genuine relationships with their customers through authentic conversations, which give customers the chance to tell brands who they are, what their values are, and what they stand for. Tildei has cracked the code and managed to do something no other marketing software company has done: develop a new plane on which the brand-customer dynamic can exist. We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Mark, Kevin, and Manisha as they build Tildei and usher in the future of marketing.

Our take: Tildei’s initial channels of focus are Instagram and WhatsApp, with 2 and 3 billion monthly active users respectively. Leveraging the channels’ Business API, Tildei allows marketers to quickly create compelling conversations and develop robust, real-time customer profiles in a manner that hasn’t been done. Last year, Tildei became a WhatsApp Business Partner, unlocking even more power for its customers and gaining a significant advantage over would-be competitors. Every day, 100 billion messages are sent using WhatsApp. Instagram has 375 million DM users in a month. A brand’s customers are already actively using these channels in authentic ways — in group chats, with friends, and family, and, now, with Tildei, businesses. As the digital transformation continues to disrupt the world of commerce, brands need to evolve their engagement strategies to fit the times. Tildei is at the forefront of this development, and has identified a pathway to scale customer-brand relationships at a personal level.

Further reading: Tildei Emerges from Stealth with $6 Million in Seed Funding to Revolutionize Conversational Marketing in Instagram and WhatsApp” via Tildei

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Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau

Published in Lerer Hippeau

Lerer Hippeau is an early-stage venture capital fund founded and operated in New York City. We invest in good people with great ideas who redefine categories — and create new ones entirely.

Lerer Hippeau
Lerer Hippeau

Written by Lerer Hippeau

Lerer Hippeau is the most active early-stage venture capital fund in New York.

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