OuterSignal raises $22M in funding to bring agentic personalization to consumer brands

OuterSignal has raised $22 million in Series A funding to push a simple idea deeper into consumer commerce: brands should know far more about the people buying from them than what sits inside a CRM record.

The New York startup is building an agentic customer intelligence platform that combines commerce data with public information to create richer customer profiles, then uses that context to personalize marketing, advertising, merchandising, and customer outreach.

The round was co-led by Long Journey Ventures and Abstract Ventures, with backing from BAM Ventures, Top Shelf Ventures, SuperAngel.Fund, and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. A long list of founders, operators, and executives joined as angel investors.

OuterSignal launched in January 2026 and says thousands of consumer businesses already use its software across hundreds of millions of orders. Customers include AG1, HexClad, Jones Road Beauty, True Classic, Jomashop, Lucy, Gratsi, and Magic Mind.

The pitch comes at a moment when consumer brands are spending heavily on AI, yet many still rely on fairly blunt segmentation. A customer might be classified by purchase history, location, or loyalty status, but that often leaves marketers with only a narrow view of who that person actually is.

OuterSignal wants to fill in that missing context.

From customer records to customer identities

The company connects to a brand’s commerce platform or CRM and builds a broader profile around each customer. Its agents can then create segments, flag high-value buyers, identify creators or influencers already purchasing a product, generate personalized campaigns, and create advertising audiences.

That shifts personalization away from broad categories and closer to the individual.

“We built OuterSignal to solve the very problem I had running consumer businesses over the last 15 years,” said Zach Zelner, co-founder and CEO of OuterSignal. “Generative AI finally makes truly 1:1 experiences possible, but only if you understand each person on the other end. This round allows us to continue building best-in-class intelligence that drives person-level personalization across billions of touchpoints.”

One of the more interesting use cases is influencer discovery. Rather than searching externally for creators who may fit a brand, OuterSignal can identify existing customers who already have an audience.

HexClad says that has changed how it approaches partnerships.

“As a retention team, everything starts with really knowing our customers, and OuterSignal has given us a clearer picture of who they are than we’ve ever had. It’s also uncovered something we didn’t expect: a huge number of creators and influencers who already cook with HexClad and love it. OuterSignal has become integral to how we build influencer partnerships, because the best voices for our brand are the ones already in our kitchens,” said Noah Pine, Director of Retention at HexClad.

That same idea runs through the broader product. AI systems can generate millions of versions of a message, but personalization is far less useful if the system does not know enough about the person receiving it.

OuterSignal is betting that customer context will become one of the most valuable layers in the AI marketing stack.

“OuterSignal’s platform unlocks a new paradigm for agentic personalization. Their growth has been remarkable, and we’re proud to back them as they power delightful marketing and experiences for all consumer businesses,” said Ramtin Naimi, Founder & General Partner, Abstract Ventures.

The company plans to use the new funding to deepen its research engine, develop person-level message personalization, and grow its engineering, sales, operations, and customer experience teams.

If OuterSignal’s thesis holds, the next phase of AI marketing may have less to do with generating more content and more to do with knowing exactly who should receive it.

Noah Friedman Co-founder & President (left); Zach Zelner Co-founder & CEO (right)