Minerva has emerged from stealth with $20 million in funding to expand its AI platform for marketing teams, aiming to help brands organize fragmented customer data and automate campaign execution.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in New York City, the company said its platform enables organizations to unify first-party customer data and use AI to generate marketing insights and workflows.
Addressing Fragmented Customer Data
Minerva was founded by Jackson Engles, Daniel Saedi and Matthew Joseph, who met while studying at the University of California, Berkeley. Before launching the company, the founders worked in finance at Lazard, Bridgewater and Citadel.
The company said its platform addresses a common challenge facing marketers, where customer information is spread across websites, mobile apps, email systems, advertising platforms and point-of-sale systems, making it difficult to build a unified customer profile.
According to a 2025 study by Zappi cited by Minerva, 41% of marketing professionals identified fragmented data as the largest barrier to effectively using customer insights.
Phin Barnes, Co-founder and Managing Partner at The General Partnership, said organizing data is central to the effective use of AI.
“AI agents are context-hungry, and whoever structures the right context for a domain wins that domain. Minerva is building the context layer for marketing. Most brands have valuable first-party data, but it’s fragmented and hard to use. Minerva turns that data into something AI can actually reason over, and then marketers can act on it.”
AI-Powered Marketing Workflows
Minerva said the funding will support the expansion of its engineering, research and go-to-market teams while helping the company launch a self-service version of its platform and expand into additional consumer sectors.
Developed in collaboration with OpenAI using GPT-5.5 models, the platform includes two AI-powered systems.
The first, called the Agentic Data Engineer, automates customer data preparation by profiling datasets, generating transformation SQL and validating outputs. The second, the Agentic Data Scientist, allows marketing teams to create predictive models using natural language prompts rather than programming.
The company said the platform is designed to automate much of the operational work associated with campaign planning, execution and reporting.
Customer Growth
Minerva said it has signed more than three dozen customers, including the NBA, Juicebox, Luxury Presence, Trust & Will and Wander.
According to the company, organizations using the platform have reported a 3.4-times improvement in paid media return on ad spend and a 2.5-times increase in qualified lead generation from direct mail campaigns. Minerva added that customers are typically onboarded in less than 24 hours and begin seeing results within 30 days.
Chief Executive Officer Jackson Engles said the platform is intended to reduce manual work for marketing teams.
“Marketing teams are under pressure to deliver better outcomes with more complexity, more channels and more data than ever before. Minerva gives marketers the context and infrastructure to understand their customers more deeply and act on those insights faster. Our goal is to give repetitive, operational work to AI so our customers can spend more time on the work that requires real human judgment.”
Backed by Institutional Investors
The $20 million funding round included investments from The General Partnership, 8VC, Lingotto Innovation, Topology Ventures and NBA Investments, among others.
The public funding announcement coincides with the official launch of Minerva’s platform.