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Founders: R.J. Talyor, Allyson Talyor, Tyler Hill, Egan Montgomery
Established: 2024
Top executives:
- R.J. Talyor, CEO
- Allyson Talyor, lead data scientist
- Tyler Hill, head of product and design
- Egan Montgomery, vice president of marketing
- Brian Smith, chief technology officer
- Sam Smith, vice president of engineering
Equity raised: $2 million pre-seed round, currently raising a seed round
2024 revenue: $350,000
Projected 2025 revenue: $1 million
Employees: 7
Location: Indianapolis
Affiliations: none
Patents: none
What does the company do? Backstroke provides a platform that helps business-to-consumer companies use generative artificial intelligence to create marketing messages for email, text and mobile notifications. The company uses proprietary consumer data, brand training sets and AI models to increase revenue-per-message sent to customers 15% to 20%.
What problem is it trying to solve? Traditional copywriting takes time and people—and companies don’t always have the data they need to guide the creative process.
Latest news: Backstroke last month hosted Longaxis, its inaugural user conference, in New York. The sold-out show featured 100 retailers.
Why Backstroke made the list: Founder R.J. Talyor is experienced in tech startups. He was one of the first 50 employees at email marketing company ExactTarget, where he led messaging product teams through the company’s $2.5 billion acquisition by Salesforce in 2013. Talyor also founded Pattern89, a creative AI platform that was acquired by Shutterstock Inc. in 2021.•
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