Rocksalt: Inbound Marketing in the Age of AI
Our investment in Rocksalt
Today we’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Arjun Moorthy, Anita Moorthy, and Ajoy Sojan and the entire Rocksalt team as they build the modern inbound marketing platform for the AI era.
For the last 20 years, B2B marketing teams could credibly rely on content marketing as a tried and true channel for customer acquisition: write high quality content, get indexed by Google and discovered via SEO, and drive search traffic to your website where customers can learn more or buy.
That compact is breaking down now in the age of AI. The AI search tipping point has arrived, with more than 50% of search results being AI results, across Google’s own AI results as well as newer “Answer Engines” (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc). AI generated B2B content has flooded the zone, leaving buyers searching for authentic content and insights as part of their buyer journey.
While still early, this AI-driven shift is pushing buyers to other places to discover and research B2B products, specifically social tools like LinkedIn, Slack, and Reddit, where the conversation is happening. Marketers are underprepared for this shift and need to adapt to this new reality.
Rocksalt: Helping SMBs Find and Engage with the Right Audience Online
Enter Rocksalt. Rocksalt helps businesses find and authentically engage with conversations among peers and industry experts who are actively discussing their market and products. These conversations are scattered across different forums, communities, and channels, and represent the new organic top of funnel for marketers.
By telling Rocksalt your areas of expertise, and the audience you are trying to reach, Rocksalt’s AI-powered solution goes out and finds the right people and discussions, helps you engage authentically, and unifies and simplifies your engagement across the disparate platforms out there – all in 15 minutes a day.
As a result, small and medium businesses can get discovered organically in this new era, by leveraging their own in-house experts to build credibility where their buyers are spending time, making it easy for busy execs and subject matter experts to raise their visibility in these forums.
Being in these forums not only builds awareness with the target audience, it also builds relevance for AI answers, as those AI Engines now often reference from these types of forum responses directly.
From Inbound 1.0 to 2.0
This problem space is one that Arjun and his co-founders are deeply familiar with. Arjun was a very early employee at Hubspot, where he helped build the definitive inbound marketing platform of that era. After selling his last business The Factual to Yahoo in 2022, and as he observed the tectonic shifts that AI was driving in the B2B marketing ecosystem, Arjun returned to his roots to build the next-gen inbound marketing suite for the AI era.
His co-founders Anita and Ajoy are perfect complements - Anita is an accomplished CMO herself, and Ajoy was Arjun’s right hand man and technical co-founder at Factual, where they grinded for years, exhibiting the grit and fortitude one needs to have a chance at building a special company. We stayed close to Arjun as he was ideating, and were fortunate to partner with Arjun in this seed round last year.
Let’s Go!
We at Garuda Ventures are thrilled to be partners since inception with the Rocksalt team, investing alongside friends at Lightspeed, Defy Ventures, and an A+ group of angels. Let’s go!
For more on Rocksalt, check out the company’s website.
Garuda Ventures is a B2B focused pre-seed fund, most often leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. The firm aims to be a founder's first call as they navigate their way from a deck and a dream to building a category-defining company. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc