Octave Raises $5.5 Million to Enhance AI-Powered Marketing Platform
San Francisco-based marketing tech startup Octave has secured $5.5 million in seed funding to expand its AI-powered go-to-market platform. The platform helps companies build ideal customer profiles and develop effective marketing campaign strategies.
Octave was founded by Zach Vidibor, who has worked on sales teams at LinkedIn, DocuSign, and Dropbox. Vidibor’s experience with existing inbound marketing and sales tools like HubSpot and Salesforce led him to create Octave, as he felt these tools “just suck energy from you, they don’t help you.” The startup’s mantra is to provide a “battery-included experience.”
The funding round was led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Bee Partners, and inVest Ventures – a fund focused on LinkedIn alumni. This follows a $2.9 million pre-seed round in 2022 led by Craft Ventures and Tidepool Labs.
Octave’s platform harnesses AI technology, likening its approach to building a car around advanced AI engines like GPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek. The company launched publicly in February 2024 and operates on a subscription-based freemium model, offering a forever-free tier and paid plans starting at $150 per month.
With the new funding, Octave plans to ramp up hiring in its go-to-market team, including engineers, product designers, and a head of growth. The CEO emphasized focusing on individuals with domain experience, stating that AI tools now available to engineers are playing a role in these hiring decisions.
“We’re really trying to focus on people that have domain experience and building in areas that are close to our problem space,” Vidibor said. “Maybe you are not the rockstar, change the world engineer, but you can balance that out now, a little bit, with some of these tools.”
