Senzai went into AI optimization to guide LatAm companies to the right customers

Businesses pay big bucks to get the latest and greatest artificial intelligence tools, but if your business goals aren’t related to the technology, it’s often not getting the full effect of AI. Senzai wants to change that for companies in Latin America.

Julian López-Portillo and Darren Timmins founded the Mexico City-based company after leaving their respective jobs a year ago: López-Portillo was at software company Affinity, where he was a product leader, building performance measurement and predictive modeling products. It used AI. Timmons, who worked for some time at Affinity, was in information and enterprise architecture at telecommunications companies in the United Kingdom.

Lopez-Portillo, the CEO, told TechCrunch that he has seen companies of all sizes struggle with how to implement the emerging predictive model. Instead, they focused on showering offers, discounts, and promotions on the few customers they thought could influence the bottom line.

“I thought there was a great opportunity to bring some of these lessons to how AI can be applied in companies in Latin America, still focusing on building tools rather than solving problems,” López-Portillo said. I thought there was still an untapped area where we could build a tool that would solve this exact problem for enterprises.

As such, Senzai’s technology focuses on three tools: impact measurement, testing, and optimization to determine which customers are most likely to respond to specific sales and marketing campaigns to improve results.

Senzai is in the early stages. He started working with telecommunication and banking in the last month. Lopez-Portillo said the company earns performance-based fees by charging customers a percentage of the value generated.

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

“AI is currently in the spotlight with the arrival of ChatGPT,” Jimena Pardo, managing partner of ALLVP, said in a written statement. “The new breed of LLMs (large language models) is clearly extremely powerful and is already creating a wave of new AI tools, but we’ll have to wait and see what value they all ultimately bring. This is where the Senzai excels, focusing on the results rather than the tools, all these innovations are perfectly positioned to deliver real value (rather than competing with it).

Meanwhile, Senzai is developing the MVP with the first few customers and will deploy the new funding to scale the product and make it product market fit.

“Now it’s a matter of executing the general ideas that we came back with at Affinity,” Lopez-Portillo said. “We’ve already talked to a lot of customers, so the idea is to get off the ground incredibly quickly.”