The world of lifecycle marketing—the emails, SMS messages, and push notifications companies use to retain customers—is notoriously stagnant. While social media feeds have been algorithmically personalized for over a decade, the standard marketing automation stack still relies on manual A/B testing, a process Eikona CEO Nir Weingarten calls \"slow, manual, and often misses what really drives performance.\"
\n\n\n\nEikona, an Israeli-American GenAI startup, believes it has the answer, announcing $5 million in seed Eikona funding today to deploy an adaptive AI engine that fundamentally changes how content is created and optimized. The round was led by StageOne Ventures, with participation from Wix Ventures and Crescendo Venture Partners.
\n\n\n\nThe core innovation is closing the feedback loop using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)—the same technique used to fine-tune large language models. Instead of marketers manually creating dozens of variations and testing them one by one, Eikona’s engine continuously generates, tests, and refines content (imagery, copy, layout) based on real-time engagement data.
\n\n\n\nWeingarten argues this approach allows the system to \"break free of prompting.\" Marketers are inherently biased in what they prompt an AI to create, limiting the potential content space. By letting the RLHF engine learn directly from clicks, sales, and retention rates, Eikona claims to deliver double- and triple-digit uplifts for clients in high-stakes sectors like telecom, finance, and healthcare.
\n\n\n\nThe end of manual content iteration
\n\n\n\nThe technology functions as an \"adaptation layer\" sitting between the marketer and the audience. Every message sent through email or SMS is run through this continuously learning neural net. This moves the industry past the current GenAI solutions, which often require heavy manual intervention to achieve production-grade content at scale.
\n\n\n\n“A/B testing has barely changed in 20 years,” noted Amir Ariely, former Global Creative Director at Google and an advisor for Eikona. “The AI learns from performance and actually closes the creative loop, generating new ideas and assets that get smarter with every result.”
\n\n\n\nThis $5 million Eikona funding round arrives at a critical time. Gartner reports that marketing budgets have stalled, yet the cost of acquiring a new customer remains significantly higher than retaining an existing one. Eikona is positioning its RLHF-powered platform as the necessary evolution for lifecycle marketing, finally bringing the algorithmic personalization standard in social media to the enterprise retention stack. The company is already integrated into the marketing automation systems of dozens of global companies.
\n
