Senzai uses AI optimization to direct Latin American companies to the right customers

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By Webdesk


Companies pay a lot of money to have the latest and greatest artificial intelligence tools, but if your company’s goal is not technically related, it often fails to get the full AI effect. Senzai wants to change that for companies in Latin America.

Julian Lopez-Portillo and Darren Timmins co-founded the Mexico City-based company about a year ago after leaving their respective jobs: Lopez-Portillo was at software company Afiniti, where he was head of product, where he developed performance measurement and predictive modeling products developed that used AI. Timmons, who also spent time at Afiniti, was in data and enterprise architecture at telecommunications companies in the UK.

Lopez-Portillo, CEO, told TechCrunch that he saw companies of all sizes struggling to implement the predictive models they were creating. Instead, they focused on shower deals, discounts, and promotions for the few customers they believed could influence the outcome.

“I thought there was a huge opportunity to bring some of these lessons on how AI can be implemented to companies in Latin America because they still focus on building tools rather than solving problems,” said Lopez-Portillo. “I thought there’s still a niche that hasn’t been covered yet where we can build a tool that would solve this actual problem for enterprises.”

As such, Senzai’s technology focuses on three tools: measuring impact, experimenting and optimizing to find out which customers are most likely to respond to certain sales and marketing campaigns so that results improve.

Senzai is in the earliest stage. It launched last month and initially partnered with telecommunications and banks. Lopez-Portillo said the company will earn money through performance-based compensation, which charges a percentage of the value generated for customers.

It raised a $2 million pre-seed round this year to launch with three clients as it prepares for a formal launch at the end of the year. ALLVP led the round.

“AI is really in the spotlight now with the arrival of ChatGPT,” said Jimena Pardo, managing partner at ALLVP, in a written statement. “The new breed of LLMs (Large Language Models) is clearly immensely powerful and is already spawning a new wave of AI tools, but we’ll have to wait and see what value it all will eventually deliver. This is where Senzai stands out, by focusing on the results, not the tools. They are perfectly placed to leverage (rather than compete with) all this innovation to deliver real value.”

Meanwhile, Senzai has developed its MVP with those first few customers and will use the new funding to scale the product and make it fit for the product market.

“It’s now a matter of just executing the sort of general ideas we had at Afiniti,” Lopez-Portillo said. “We have already spoken to many of these customers, so the idea is to get off the ground very quickly.”



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