Different, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to plan and run marketing campaigns for business-to-business companies, has come out of stealth with $48m in funding. It announced the raise on 20 October 2026.
General Catalyst led the round and Lightspeed took part, the company said in a blog post. Dealroom and other reports described the round as a seed round; the company's post gives the amount and investors but does not name the stage.
Different did not disclose a valuation.
“We built Different so a marketing team of five can do the work of 50.”Ajeet Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Different (to Dealroom)
What Different does
Different builds software that takes over much of the work of demand generation, the part of B2B marketing that finds target accounts and runs campaigns to turn them into sales leads. The product decides which accounts to target and what message each segment should get, and runs campaigns across channels.
The company gave two customer examples. It said Descope redirected 60% of wasteful paid spend and now targets 2,800 accounts with two marketers, and that Motif went from running one campaign to more than a dozen across four channels. Descope's two marketers run up to seven programmes at once across LinkedIn, email and landing pages, and Motif's team of three made its change within a month, the company said. "Different lets us scale our team without having to scale our team," said Amar Hanspal, co-founder and chief executive of Motif.
"We built Different so a marketing team of five can do the work of 50," chief executive Ajeet Singh told Dealroom.
How the product works
Different splits the work between the software and the marketing team. Marketers set business goals, budgets and brand limits. The system proposes target accounts, segments, personas and messaging angles for them to approve, then builds ads, emails and landing pages tailored by account, persona and industry and launches them once the team signs off. It tracks which messages work for which audience and channel and recommends changes to budgets, messaging and offers.
According to the company, the system keeps a shared memory of each customer's preferences, business context and results, connects in both directions with ad platforms, email tools and CRM software, and has guardrails meant to stop off-brand or over-budget work before it goes out. Different said it tests changes against evaluation cases before they ship and spent a year refining the product with early customers.
The founders
Singh co-founded Different with Abhishek Pani and Abhinav Yajurvedi. He previously co-founded two enterprise software companies, Nutanix and ThoughtSpot. In the launch post he wrote that at both companies, doing more marketing meant hiring more specialists and buying more tools.
According to Dealroom, Pani is chief product officer and previously led machine learning for Adobe's marketing products, while Yajurvedi, the chief technology officer, worked at the Indian e-commerce companies Flipkart and Myntra.
The company is hiring in San Francisco and Bangalore, according to its blog post.
What the money is for
Different will spend the money on engineering and go-to-market hiring, Dealroom reported. The company has not said how many people it employs or how much revenue it makes.
Dealroom pointed to Gradial, which raised $65m in June, as another company working on AI for marketing teams, and said HubSpot, Salesforce and 6sense are adding AI to their demand-generation tools. It also noted that there is not yet public evidence of how Different performs for customers at scale.
Dealroom also named Together Fund, Haystack Ventures, MXV Capital and Firebolt Ventures as investors in the round. The company's own post names only General Catalyst and Lightspeed.
Company website: different.ai