Minerva raises $20M to run AI marketing agents on your first-party data
Minerva came out of stealth this week with $20 million in seed funding and a public product aimed at CMOs who are drowning in fragmented customer data. Investors include The General Partnership, 8VC, Lingotto Innovation, Topology Ventures, and NBA Investments.
The platform is built around two AI agents. An Agentic Data Engineer consolidates and standardizes first-party customer data. An Agentic Data Scientist lets marketers build and deploy predictive models through natural language prompts, no data team required. Both tools were developed in collaboration with OpenAI and run on models including GPT-5.5.
Minerva also layers on a proprietary identity graph with more than 1,000 consumer attributes, designed to make fragmented first-party data actually usable for targeting and segmentation.
The Numbers They’re Claiming
Early customer deployments, according to Minerva, produced a 3.4x improvement in paid media return on ad spend and a 2.5x increase in direct mail marketing qualified lead rates. The company says onboarding takes 24 hours.
More than three dozen customers have already signed on, including the NBA, Juicebox, Luxury Presence, Trust & Will, and Wander. The NBA relationship includes work on identifying fan engagement opportunities.
The Founding Story
Co-founders Jackson Engles, Daniel Saedi, and Matthew Joseph came out of finance, with backgrounds at Lazard, Bridgewater, and Citadel. Saedi and Joseph previously worked with alternative datasets in trading and applied that same logic to consumer marketing: structured context produces better decisions.
“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.”
Phin Barnes, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, The General Partnership
The $20 million will go toward engineering, research, and go-to-market hiring, plus building a self-service version of the platform. Minerva is currently focused on sports, hospitality, and financial services, with plans to expand into broader consumer sectors.
The company is based in Brooklyn.
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