Minerva, an AI platform built for consumer marketing leaders, has launched publicly with $20 million in funding from a group including The General Partnership, 8VC, Lingotto Innovation, Topology Ventures, NBA Investments and others. The company also announced a collaboration with OpenAI to integrate frontier models into its marketing workflows. The platform is designed to unify fragmented first-party data and enrich it with proprietary consumer context, enabling brands to run end-to-end marketing campaigns with AI agents within 24 hours. This approach directly addresses a persistent challenge: while brands possess vast amounts of customer data, its value is often locked away due to fragmentation and a lack of external context.
Unifying Data in Under a Day
Within 24 hours of onboarding, Minerva’s platform allows marketers to perform four key functions:
- Unify and unlock their brand’s first-party customer data using Minerva’s Agentic Data Engineer
- Enrich customer data with Minerva’s proprietary identity graph and more than 1,000 attributes
- Create, analyze and optimize campaigns that win customers at scale
- Measure performance and generate detailed reports on campaign performance
These steps are designed to transform raw, siloed data into AI-ready context that helps brands win customers at every stage of the funnel. By compressing what traditionally takes weeks into a single day, the platform aims to give marketing teams a significant speed advantage. The four-step process turns fragmented first-party data into structured, usable information that AI agents can act upon immediately.
From Fragmentation to Actionable Insight
Minerva was founded by Jackson Engles, Daniel Saedi and Matthew Joseph, who met at the University of California, Berkeley and began their careers in finance at Lazard, Bridgewater and Citadel, respectively. The company grew out of Saedi and Joseph’s earlier work using alternative data to trade markets, where they witnessed both the commercial power of consumer data and the difficulty of converting fragmented, inconsistent datasets into reliable insight. That experience led them to create Minerva as a tool to help companies use AI to better understand, engage and acquire customers. The founders believe that as AI agents become more capable, the limiting factor for marketing teams is no longer access to models alone, but the quality and structure of the context those models can act on.
Measurable Results and Growing Adoption
In early deployments, Minerva has already demonstrated tangible impact. The company reports that its platform helped brands improve paid media return on ad spend (ROAS) by 3.4 times and boost direct mail marketing qualified lead (MQL) rates by 2.5 times. These improvements came from rebuilding how customer data is used to acquire customers, shifting from manual processes to AI-driven workflows. Minerva has also signed approximately three dozen customers, including marquee names such as the NBA, Juicebox, Luxury Presence, Trust & Will and Wander. Notably, Minerva works with the NBA to identify opportunities that help teams deepen fan engagement.
Collaboration with OpenAI Adds Advanced AI Capabilities
Through its collaboration with OpenAI, Minerva has developed two specific workstreams using frontier models like GPT-5.5:
- The Agentic Data Engineer collapses weeks of human data engineering work into hours by profiling and understanding the structure of a customer’s first-party data, writing transformation SQL and validating the output
- The Agentic Data Scientist allows marketers with no machine learning experience to use natural language prompts — such as “find users likely to book a luxury property in the next 30 days” — to generate, validate and deploy predictive models on demand
These tools are designed to put advanced AI capabilities directly into the hands of marketing teams. They represent a shift from requiring technical expertise to enabling natural language interaction.
Industry and Investor Confidence
Marketing teams are under increasing pressure to deliver better outcomes amidst growing complexity, more channels and more data, said Jackson Engles, co-founder and CEO of Minerva. He stated that Minerva gives marketers the context and infrastructure to understand their customers more deeply and act on those insights faster. The goal, he explained, is to hand repetitive operational work to AI so that customers can focus on work requiring real human judgment. The platform is built for CMOs and marketing teams that want to move beyond manual data work, fragmented measurement and constant human oversight. Instead, teams set the objective and Minerva’s agents carry it out, shifting marketers from executing to directing.
Phin Barnes, co-founder and Managing Partner at The General Partnership, emphasized the importance of context for AI agents. “AI agents are context-hungry, and whoever structures the right context for a domain wins that domain,” Barnes said. He noted that most brands have valuable first-party data, but it is fragmented and hard to use. Minerva, he added, turns that data into something AI can actually reason over, enabling marketers to act on it. The new capital will be used to expand Minerva’s engineering, research and go-to-market teams, build out the company’s self-serve platform, and expand beyond its initial focus areas in sports, hospitality and financial services into broader consumer categories.