AI Market Map: Marketing

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From automated emails to autonomous systems

Early marketing automation was dominated by email scheduling and basic segmentation via tools like ExactTarget and Marketo. Automation was rule-based, requiring manual workflows and static lists, making it costly and primarily enterprise-focused.

MailChimp brought affordable, user-friendly email automation to SMBs, while Klaviyo advanced e-commerce-driven automation with real-time event-based triggers. Multi-channel marketing became mainstream, but content creation remained manual, data remained siloed, and workflows relied on predefined logic.

With the rise of LLMs, tools like Jasper and Copy.ai have focused on automating content generation. The latest generation of marketing software is advancing workflow integration and eliminating data silos across platforms. The promise of agentic AI is a fully autonomous marketing system, dynamically adjusting messaging, spend, and targeting across digital channels with minimal human intervention.

As a result, entirely new categories of AI marketing products are emerging — and these are exactly the areas we at Antler Elevate are excited to invest in.

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AI Market Map: Marketing

With that, let’s dig into the AI-native opportunity in Marketing.

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Copywriting & Content Generation: Jasper started as a copywriting tool, but has focused on building out Enterprise tools to maintain consistent brand voice and style guidelines across text and images. Typeface focuses on AI-generative creative and the Enterprise processes around creative management and multimodal customer journeys.

SEO Optimization & Content Marketing: Conversion AI uses AI to automate repetitive SEO tasks like SEO research, SEO optimized content generation, and website updates on a continuous and iterative basis. Connecting this data, along with Google Ads data, allows the company to give small businesses unprecedented insights into the ROI of their SEO spend.

Averi drives value in a different way by using AI to automate away the operational cadence of a content marketing manager. Averi allows marketing managers to craft their marketing strategy, plan their content calendar, and create AI generated content. Averi also allows them to match with expert freelancers to plug the gaps in their content creation, and helps manage the coordination and payment of those experts.

‍Digital Advertising: Startups like Omneky, Otis AI and Plai help with the creation and optimization of paid digital marketing campaigns across platforms. Creative is generated by AI, or converted to other ad formats using AI. And by working across Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok, and YouTube, these platforms are able to optimize ad performance across channels and maximize ROI for any advertising budget.

‍Social Media Marketing: Ocoya helps businesses manage their social media across platform by using AI to generate creative, schedule posting, and use the right hashtags to grow social media audiences on autopilot.

Dreamwell takes the pain out of the influencer marketing workflow by automating influencer discovery, influencer outreach, negotiations, ad script writing, and pricing.

‍Email Marketing & Newsletters: Email marketing is way too hard - I’m looking at you MailChimp! Ripple takes the pain out of designing beautiful marketing emails.

Singulate and Just Words take a different approach - segmenting and personalizing email marketing at scale as opposed to relying on generic email blasts.

Omnichannel Marketing: Releva uses AI for website personalization, product discovery, content creation, segmentation, and retargeting across multiple channels - including email marketing, SMS messages, WhatsApp, and social media - to maximize conversion through the funnel for ecommerce brands.

B2B Marketing: Tofu and Mutiny focuses on B2B marketing use cases like ABM, nurture campaigns, upsell and cross-sell campaigns, outbound prospecting, content marketing, and webinars.
A/B Testing: Tools like Fibr use AI to personalize landing pages, continuously run A/B tests, and maximize conversions across the website.

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From AI-generated content to autonomous campaign optimization, the marketing stack is rapidly evolving beyond static automation into a dynamic, self-improving system. As investors, we believe this transformation will create breakout companies that reshape how businesses engage customers.

Antler Elevate’s recent investment in Conversion AI is a case in point: Conversion AI’s unified marketing platform helps small businesses autonomously runs SEO, ad campaigns, and and measure ROI across channels — requiring only minimal human oversight. We’re excited about this investment because Conversion AI exemplifies the kind of AI-driven, scalable solution that can democratize marketing for thousands of businesses — exactly the type of opportunity Antler Elevate looks to back.

This is a generational opportunity to build and invest in startups. If you’re building an AI-native marketing startup at the Seed-Series B stage, reach out to me at chris.millisits@antler.co.

Or if you’re just getting started, Antler runs the premier global pre-seed accelerator across 20 countries. You can apply to the relevant location using this link.