Pixis is a global tech company that develops accessible codeless AI technology to help brands scale all aspects of their marketing and augment their decision-making in a world of infinitely complex consumer behavior. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Pixis co-founder and Chief Business Officer Hari Valiyath to learn more about the company.
Valiyath earned his bachelor’s degree in electronics and instrumentation engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science. While there, he met Pixis’ Global CEO and co-founder, Shubham Mishra, and Pixis’ co-founder and CTO, Vrushali Prasade. Together, the three founded Absentia Virtual Reality and then came to form Pixis.
Hari Valiyath’s Background
What is Valiyath’s background? Valiyath said:
“In 2012, my co-founders and I crossed paths in college, where we were involved in generative AI research within the 3D realm. Our work with generative AI led to us developing a system that could produce thousands of 3D gaming assets, all guided by text prompts, at a fraction of the time it traditionally took. While this breakthrough had significant implications for the gaming industry, we discovered a more promising addressable market ripe for disruption.”
Formation Of Pixis
How did the idea for Pixis come together? Valiyath shared:
“Recognizing the yet unexploited potential of AI in growth marketing, we decided to validate the product’s economic viability in that area. Our efforts caught the attention of a major banking company, which deployed our system to generate creative assets internally. Using our tech, they generated assets at one-hundredth the time it was previously taking them. That was an exciting discovery for us, and choosing to go down that path was pivotal for the company.”
“Our next steps became crystal clear: design a comprehensive customer-centric AI system that allowed marketers to tap into AI’s potential without requiring coding expertise. This principle became the bedrock of our company, ensuring every product provided a user-friendly, code-free experience.”
“Building on the success of AI in creative generation, we doubled down our efforts and began to build an all-encompassing AI infrastructure for core growth marketing areas. This evolution spanned targeting generative AI-led creative content and brand asset generation and leveraging real-time data for in-flight optimization.”
“While our journey began with a generative AI product, Pixis has evolved into a company containing multiple patented AI models that have emerged as pivotal tools in targeting, media planning, and performance optimization.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Valiyath reflected:
“I have so many great memories, but the best by far is when our first banking customer showed us what they achieved with our product. That led to a remarkable cascading effect where our mission was suddenly clear, and we sprang into action at a genuinely dizzying speed! Who would have thought that something we built for the gaming industry could disrupt the marketing landscape in such a manner? Looking back, all the hustle of those days, including the gut-wrenching disappointments we endured, are fond memories today.”
Macroeconomic Effect
Has the current macroeconomic climate affected your company? Valiyath acknowledged:
“We’ve noticed a clear shift in organizational priorities. In the post-pandemic era, there’s a stronger focus on not just surviving but thriving, with an increased emphasis on profitability and sustainable growth.”
“There’s a growing demand for efficient, scalable, and customizable AI solutions, and our products seamlessly meet this emerging need. Regardless of their tech expertise, companies seek tools that deliver results without substantial development costs or steep learning curves. Pixis is the ideal solution – it’s user-friendly, potent, and perfectly tailored to meet current market demands. As a testament to this, we’ve achieved an impressive 140% growth this year and are on track to reach profitability in the last quarter.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Valiyath explained:
“Pixis serves as a codeless AI infrastructure tailored for growth marketers. By ‘codeless,’ we mean that no pixels, cookies, or engineering resources are necessary for the seamless integration of our technology. During our initial market research, we identified that the common challenge was onboarding a new partner, which often took weeks or months due to approval processes and tech team availability. To address this, we designed our integration process to be as easy as downloading a plugin.”
“At its core, Pixis contains three distinct AI engines: Targeting, Creative and Performance. These engines harness proprietary AI models to assist brands in identifying their target audiences, creating compelling content and autonomously managing bids and budgets within a single platform. Even more enticing is that they do this efficiently across multiple platforms. We’ve established integrations with platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Bing, with plans to expand our presence across all major digital media publishers and ad networks in the coming year.”
“A 10%-15% improvement in performance is what we guarantee for our new customers trying and testing our technology, parallelly ensuring high levels of budget efficiency and significant time savings across their marketing teams.”
Evolution Of Pixis’ Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Valiyath noted:
“We started with rule-based systems, swiftly transitioning into a self-learning infrastructure. Since then, we’ve collaborated closely with customers, industry experts, investors and analysts to craft products that simplify and enrich performance marketers’ lives. Whether it’s our generative AI-powered creative studio or our AI-driven cross-platform performance marketing systems, our products continually adapt to the challenges posed by the ever-changing macroeconomic landscape.”
“From being a single-platform expert, our product now offers strong cross-platform capabilities. We’ve also expanded our product suite to offer tailor-made solutions for mid-size businesses that battle a different and unique set of marketing challenges. Additionally, we’ve strengthened our generative AI suite and continue to build on it.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Valiyath cited:
“1.) Our substantial focus is on Creative AI research and development, enabling the instant generation of photorealistic creative assets, including 3D images and videos, through text prompts. This creative studio seamlessly integrates with our campaign optimization capabilities, embedding contextual campaign data into the creative asset generation process.
2.) We started with 20 AI models; today, we have over 200 AI models that comprise our infrastructure. We’ve also introduced AI playgrounds, empowering customers to customize models for their specific needs and giving them greater freedom when solving challenges unique to their brand.
3.) Our product for mid-size customers is now available and has been doing well.
4.) We’ve automated campaign setup and launch, leveraging historical performance data to significantly reduce go-live times.
5.) We launched Pixis Analyze, an AI campaign auditor and analyzer that acts on text inputs and answers questions related to campaigns, data interpretation, and AI actions.”
Customer Success Story
After asking Valiyath about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One of our success stories is DHL Express. As a global logistics leader, DHL Express sought an advanced solution to enhance audience targeting efficiency, expand cross-channel and regional campaigns, and optimize contextual marketing.”
“The brand deployed our AI for campaigns across Google and Meta. With AI, it could pinpoint high-converting audience segments and engagement patterns, resulting in a 35% increase in click-through rates. Furthermore, Pixis’ campaign optimizations reduced the cost per point by 13% and delivered an impressive 49% cost savings compared to previous digital campaigns.”
“DHL Express simplified manual marketing tasks, enabling its internal teams to focus on strategic initiatives and overall revenue growth. In addition to DHL Express, JOE & THE JUICE achieved significant outcomes by leveraging Pixis’ codeless AI infrastructure.”
“Pixis’ AI was deployed on Joe and The Juice’s campaigns across multiple locations around the globe. It quickly identified multiple performance and targeting inefficiencies and started optimizing for bid and budget across campaigns and locations. This implementation drove more high intent visitors to Joe and The Juice’s platform, who became customers soon after. The overall efforts led to a 12% reduction in Cost Per Installation (CPI) and 14% increase in Conversion Rate (CVR).”
Funding/Revenue
After asking Valiyath about the company’s funding and revenue information, he revealed:
“We have raised $209 million in funding, with the recent $85 million in Series C1 funding led by Touring Capital and new and existing investors, including Grupo Carso and General Atlantic. We have crossed $50 million ARR this quarter and are projecting to do around $70 million by the end of this year.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Pixis from its competition? Valiyath affirmed:
“In our business, we distinguish ourselves through three key elements:
1.) Cutting-edge technology: At Pixis, AI is not a buzzword used to exploit today’s AI rush. For us, AI has been and continues to be the very core of our business. Our engines are intricate neural networks that harness the latest advancements in deep learning, large language models, and generative technology. They are purpose-built to address the most demanding digital marketing challenges, which happen as platforms and channels grow and evolve. One of our main goals is to make marketers’ lives easier through technology and not harder, which inspired us to simplify access and integration through a method as simple as installing a plugin. This cuts down deployment time from weeks to minutes, making it more user-friendly and feature-rich than any other SaaS platform.
2.) Cross-platform flexibility: Pixis is agnostic when it comes to publishers. Our AI engines are trained on a brand’s performance data, allowing Pixis to allocate budgets, identify target audiences and generate creative content within and across various publishers. This empowers our customers to effortlessly execute the most efficient delivery strategies. We dynamically reallocate spending based on insights from our AI engines, aligning the brand’s entire digital media budget, target audience and creative assets with the success parameters defined by the brand’s attribution methodology. The time and efficiency gains can be reinvested to maximize budget growth and enable teams to focus on high-impact strategic challenges.
3.) Generative AI expertise: Leveraging our expertise in Gen AI and honed through 3D model generation for gaming, we’ve extended our capabilities to creative asset development. Amid the buzz surrounding Gen AI, we stand out as a business actively training AI models to generate assets tailored specifically for digital advertising. Thanks to our publisher-agnostic approach, the knowledge and patterns we uncover can be applied across a brand’s entire media investment. Furthermore, we’re paving the way for a universal technology framework beyond individual platforms. We’re currently excelling in variant creation, copywriting and product feed enhancements, and in the process of testing Creative Studio. This editing suite allows for fine-tuning media created using our AI technology, opening up endless possibilities. From diverse background settings to realistic 3D environments, weather, lighting, precise movements, physics, sizing and formatting, all are customizable or automatically tailored for specific publishers or placements.
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Valiyath concluded:
“As we look ahead, we’re on the brink of introducing an innovative, creative AI suite powered by state-of-the-art AI technology. We’re in the beta testing stage with a select group of our clients, and the responses have been heartening. Meanwhile, we’re diligently fortifying our cross-platform capabilities, and the recent debut of Pixis Analyze has achieved outstanding outcomes, representing yet another significant stride in our ongoing evolution, along with our intention and efforts of doubling down on the Latin American market.”
