Minerva announced its public launch alongside $20 million in funding from investors including The General Partnership, 8VC, Lingotto Innovation, Topology Ventures, NBA Investments, and others. The company also unveiled a collaboration with OpenAI aimed at bringing AI-powered capabilities to consumer marketing teams.
Built for chief marketing officers and marketing organizations, Minerva enables brands to unify fragmented first-party customer data, enrich it with proprietary consumer insights, and deploy AI agents to automate end-to-end marketing workflows. According to the company, customers can onboard to the platform and begin using its capabilities within 24 hours.
Founded by Jackson Engles, Daniel Saedi, and Matthew Joseph, Minerva emerged from the founders’ experiences working in finance at Lazard, Bridgewater, and Citadel. Saedi and Joseph previously used alternative datasets in trading markets and recognized both the value of consumer information and the challenge of transforming fragmented data into actionable insights. They launched Minerva with the goal of helping companies leverage AI to better understand, engage, and acquire customers.
The platform features an Agentic Data Engineer, which helps companies consolidate and standardize first-party customer data, and an Agentic Data Scientist that allows marketers to create and deploy predictive models through natural language prompts. Developed in collaboration with OpenAI and utilizing models such as GPT-5.5, these capabilities are designed to reduce weeks of data engineering and analysis work to a matter of hours.
Minerva also enriches customer data through a proprietary identity graph containing more than 1,000 attributes. The company said early deployments have helped customers improve paid media return on ad spend by 3.4 times and increase direct mail marketing qualified lead rates by 2.5 times.
The company has already signed more than three dozen customers, including the NBA, Juicebox, Luxury Presence, Trust & Will, and Wander. Minerva is also working with the NBA to help identify opportunities for deeper fan engagement.
According to Minerva, the platform shifts marketers away from managing operational tasks and toward directing AI agents that execute campaign creation, analysis, optimization, and reporting. The company believes that well-structured customer context will become increasingly valuable as AI agents become more capable and marketing teams seek to improve decision-making and performance.
The new capital will support the expansion of Minerva’s engineering, research, and go-to-market teams, while also helping the company build a self-service platform and expand beyond its initial focus on sports, hospitality, and financial services into broader consumer sectors.
Based in Brooklyn, Minerva provides AI-powered tools that help brands create, analyze, and optimize campaigns using enriched customer data and proprietary consumer context.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Jackson Engles, Co-Founder And CEO, Minerva
“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, so then marketers can act on it.”
Phin Barnes, Co-Founder And Managing Partner, The General Partnership
