As artificial intelligence has continued to infiltrate nearly every industry, siblings Arjun Moorthy and Anita Moorthy saw opportunity.
After spending six years as a vice president at HubSpot, Arjun went on to found The Factual, a consumer news ratings engine that was acquired by Yahoo. There, he later led Yahoo’s AI Newsfeed. Anita was previously VP of marketing at Cleverly.
The pair came to the conclusion that the days of relying solely on SEO or content marketing were long gone. So in October 2023, they teamed up with Ajoy Sajon to start Rocksalt, an agentic AI platform that aims to help B2B companies establish credibility in relevant professional online communities — in other words, become influencers of sorts.
Previously, “companies wrote content that was indexed by Google, and prospective customers landed on the company’s blog via search. This playbook no longer works in the AI era,” Anita said.
“People no longer search the same way and are either passively browsing social feeds or actively researching on AI,” she added.
Enter Rocksalt. The company operates on the premise that for small and medium businesses to be discovered in this new age, they need to find a way to get their in-house “experts to build authentically credibility in the social forums where their audience hangs out,” noted Anita. Those forums include LinkedIn and Slack communities.
“The problem for such ‘experts’ is that engaging on social forums is inefficient,” she said. “It’s hard to know which conversations are worth engaging in.”
The startup aims to help with that issue, she said, by surfacing “the most high-value conversations” so that it’s easier for executives and subject-matter experts “to engage consistently and build awareness in these feeds.”
Rocksalt claims it can help companies grow organically and build AI relevancy by having their executives be in online forums, engaging in discussions and answering questions, and it claims they can do it in just 10 minutes a day.
New funding for growth
To grow Rocksalt further, the San Francisco-based company has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, it told Crunchbase News exclusively. Defy.vc also participated in the round, along with angel investors such as Gokul Rajaram, Mike Volpe and Atlassian President Anu Bharadwaj.
The company plans to use its new capital to expand to other platforms such as Reddit and Discord. It also wants to add capabilities “to create and repurpose content to answer questions at scale.”
AI that understands intent
Anita is quick to differentiate Rocksalt from keyword monitoring tools for different platforms. Their offering, she maintains, is not keyword-based.
“We are an AI platform that understands the user’s intent and surfaces conversations that are beyond keywords,” she noted. “We also have comment-assisting functionality that guides users in engaging authentically without generating generic AI comments.”
Rocksalt, which operates on a SaaS model, has several customers including Tamr, Zocks, HedgeFlows and NinjaCat as well as close to 15,000 free users on its Slack and LinkedIn products.
Founders’ marketing pedigree
It’s not the first time the siblings have worked together. Anita also worked at The Factual in addition to serving in other senior marketing roles. Arjun said her marketing experience was crucial in starting Rocksalt.
“While building The Factual I learned how important marketing is to strategy and how I wasn’t very good at this because I tended to overly focus on product,” he said. “I swore that if I did another startup I’d have marketing support from day one, and that is what Anita brings to the mix.”
Meanwhile, Anita calls herself “an accidental entrepreneur.”
“Because we’re siblings, the trust issue was solved on day one and so we are able to move fast: He obsesses over product and data, I live in the customer conversation,” she said. “That complementary loop lets us course-correct in hours, not weeks.”
Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said he was drawn to the founding team’s depth of experience.
“Rocksalt is helping to rewrite the inbound playbook,” he said. “Today’s savvy buyers trust experts, not a flood of marketing content designed for SEO. The leadership team at Rocksalt … is making it easier for businesses to invest in organic marketing. Inbound marketing will never be the same.”
AI marketing startups on track for funding high
Venture funding to startups at the intersection of AI and marketing has soared this year, Crunchbase data shows, and is on pace to match the high mark achieved in 2021.
Through the first half of 2025, startups in the space have raised more than $344 million globally, a giant leap compared to the $65 million raised in the first half of last year and already well over the $252 million raised in all of 2024. Marketing and AI-related startups raised more than $705 million globally in 2021, the peak year, according to Crunchbase data.
Related Crunchbase query:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the
Crunchbase Daily.