The top eCommerce companies have a shared secret sauce: Experimentation. The top 1% of brands have prioritized testing and experimentation to enhance their digital content. They test each morsel of digital content, eliminating subjectivity and leaning on data to drive objectively optimal performance.
Here is the rub: While experimentation is a known growth lever, it’s historically been challenging and expensive to operationalize. Picture large teams cobbling together inefficient systems across a wide range of ever-changing content channels with unique needs. Plus, eCommerce marketers face heavy competition for attention, quick creative fatigue, reduced data access for content optimization due to privacy restrictions, and consumer expectations for seamless omnichannel experiences. It’s no wonder customer acquisition costs are on the rapid rise and increasingly channeling a marketer’s margin.
Enter Copley — Copley is democratizing the power of experimentation in the era of AI and agents, turning small marketing teams into content powerhouses, and giving brands more confidence in where to spend their next dollar. We’ve proudly co-led their $4.8M pre-seed round alongside Asymmetric Capital Partners. The round also had participation from several prominent angel investors, including the co-founders of Klaviyo, Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, and former CEOs of commerce titans Demandware / Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Copley’s AI-powered platform is built to optimize content performance, providing marketers with unmatched capabilities in experimentation and optimization. By enabling marketers to create and deliver personalized content, Copley is changing how brands connect with their audiences.
Marketing Experimentation in the Era of AI and Agents
Copley is building a full-stack acquisition optimization platform, enabling businesses to quickly develop, test, and improve their customer acquisition strategy across all their channels — all within one platform.
With native integrations into the major eCommerce SaaS applications, Copley ingests branded content and its historic performance, labels it with specific traits, and uses these traits to identify new combinations of content to use for future experiments. The Copley platform also uses the latest generative AI models to create high-fidelity, on-brand content within minutes. With integrated analytics, Copley gives users a clear view of how content is performing across all channels and how specific imagery, verbiage, and tones resonate with customers. Copley’s platform is a continuously learning system, blending exploration and opportunity for optimal outcomes.
Just as Klaviyo disrupted the marketing automation landscape during the Software 2.0 era, Copley is going after the AI-native, agentic platform opportunity to change how ecommerce brands create, deliver, and optimize their content to acquire and retain customers.
Early Copley customers are already reaping the benefits of the technology. “The first experiments we ran with Copley resulted in the highest ROAS across all of our ads,” said Aaron Wong, Digital Marketing Manager at Million Dollar Baby. “These tests were done with content that we were on the verge of retiring, allowing us to extend the life of it and greatly improve the value we got out of our production costs while driving significant revenue.”
Talented Founders Spinning Out of Klaviyo
At Underscore VC, we’re backing the next generation of bold business builders, many of which are emerging from iconic, venture-backed tech companies. The founders of Copley emerged from Boston’s Klaviyo, a company whose leadership admirably cultivates entrepreneurship, going as far as to invest in those that depart to build something new.
Copley’s CEO, David Henriquez, was formerly a sales engineering leader at Klaviyo. Sean Marshall, Chief Operating Officer, was formerly Klaviyo’s Senior Vice President of Sales and is credited with helping to build the structure and scalability of Klaviyo’s go-to-market motion. The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Torra, hails from Salesforce (and previously Demandware) where he expertly built and scaled engineering teams and is credited with building the foundation of what is now Commerce Cloud’s AI capabilities. The co-founders are steeped in market expertise and have an aggressive “build like Klaviyo” mindset focused on efficiency. We’ve been impressed with their high conviction and speed of execution, paired with thoughtfulness and a real openness to feedback.
We’re grateful to have been introduced to the Copley team by Jeff Barnett, who is an Underscore VC Core Partner and the former CEO of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Jeff is also an angel investor in Copley.
What’s Next for Copley
Copley will use the pre-seed funding to accelerate product development and hire key employees across engineering, sales, and customer success. Copley is currently offering their software as part of a limited Beta. If you are interested in using experimentation to drive growth for your brand, sign up here!
