Some startups launch with a roadmap. Conversion started with a detention slip. Neil Tewari was caught in high school streaming TechCrunch Disrupt during class. While most kids would have taken the walk of shame to their parents, Tewari called a family friend and pitched his dreams instead. Four years later, that same friend wired the seed check that set this thing in motion.
Fast forward to 2025 and Conversion, the AI-native marketing automation platform born in a UC Berkeley dorm room, just closed a $28 million Series A led by Abstract Ventures with True Ventures, HOF Capital, Antler VC, and a few heavy-hitting OpenAI angels in the mix. That $2 million seed? Now part of $30 million raised to date.
Tewari, who dropped out of Berkeley’s EECS program after three semesters, teamed up with fellow dropout James Jiao, a former IMC Trading quant intern. Together, they built Conversion not as a retrofitted legacy tool with AI sprinkled on top, but as AI from the ground up. This is not HubSpot with a facelift. It is Figma-smooth, Clay-smart, and scales like an enterprise-grade beast.
In under two years, the team has pushed nearly $10 million in ARR, pulling 90% of their customers straight from legacy systems. Over 4,000 growing businesses, including OpenAI, Abacum, Paraform, Warmly, Motion, HockeyStack, and Clay, are running campaigns, segmenting audiences, and personalizing outreach without the duct-taped workflows the industry has tolerated for too long.
The rebrand from StyleAI to Conversion earlier this year wasn’t cosmetic, it was a statement. Marketing automation has been ruled by platforms designed before the iPhone existed. Conversion is betting on an entirely different architecture: real-time CRM syncs that don’t let your data rot, Magic Blocks that personalize campaigns based on actual product usage, and nocode automation that feels like it knows what you want before you drag the next box.
This raise fuels more than just headcount expansion in engineering, product, and GTM. It funds the quiet arms race to own the next decade of B2B marketing infrastructure. The target is clear: midsize businesses stuck on platforms built for 2005. The hook? Replace the clunky with the intelligent and make marketing automation feel less like configuring a fax machine and more like magic.
