When working as instructors at a martial arts studio, Van Panchangam and Rithvik Prakki were also tasked with handling sales and marketing for the small business. The two instructors met with potential clients to figure out a program that would best fit each customer’s needs. But they found it difficult to have these conversations without first knowing anything about the clients.
Furthermore, they indicated that learning about clients while in the process of figuring out a well-suited program amounted to a lot of back and forth. So Panchangam and Prakki began researching clients ahead of time, which helped them better tailor their sales.
This ultimatley led Panchangam and Prakki to co-found Lexal AI earlier this year. This startup uses an AI tool for hyper-personalized marketing, automating processes like the client research Panchangam and Prakki had grown accustomed to conducting on their own. The product scans the internet for existing information on a potential customer and aggregates that data for a company’s marketing team to use.
“We cut down on a lot of the pointless back and forth where we get nothing done,” Prakki said. “We actually just get right to the point and help them get to where they want to be as fast as possible.”
Lexal participated in this summer’s Launch Chapel Hill accelerator program. (GrepBeat has also covered some of the startup’s fellow cohort members, including Ember Learning, Jobbly, and SolveCircle.) The founders said Launch helped them refine their mission statement and further develop their product, which launched in early August.
“The biggest highlight for me is the connections that we’ve made,” Panchangam said of their time in the accelerator. “We started off not really in the entrepreneurship space of Chapel Hill, but I feel like we have a good grasp of it—like we’re inside of it now, we know people to talk to if we need something.”
Lexal’s initial product is a Google Chrome extension that marketing professionals or other users can download to their web browser. Users input a person’s name as well as other information they have about them—such as an email address or social media username—and the AI will then produce a breakdown of the person’s entire online presence.
Some of the information that is collected might be from articles written about that person; some from transcripts of any videos or podcasts they have produced; and some from posts on text-driven social media platforms such as LinkedIn and X.
Prakki described it as “almost like an AI detective.”
Using Lexal, marketing agencies can collect data about trends among their existing clientele to find the best-fitting customer profile to target. This tool can also be used to understand potential clients’ backgrounds prior to initial meetings.
All of the data that Lexal collects is open source, meaning it’s already on the internet. Lexal is GDPR and CCPA compliant (these being different sets of guidelines for collecting personal data).
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Startup: Lexal
Co-Founders: Van Panchangam and Rithvik Prakki
Founded: 2024
Location: Chapel Hill
Website: lexalai.com
Funding: Bootstrapped; seeking funding
Size of team: 2
As of now, Lexal is meant for mid-size companies selling in the B2B SaaS space, but Prakki said their customer base may evolve as the startup grows. The Chrome extension is free to start with, and as the founders further develop the product, there will be a fee for the software.
Competitors to Lexal include zoominfo and Apollo.io, but Prakki said those services offer limited sets of information—such as place of employment and email. By contrast, Lexal provides “hyper-personalized” information, returning more data and facilitating individualized marketing strategies.
Prakki and Panchangam are both undergraduate students at UNC-Chapel Hill. Both are also both working as freelance software developers at The Pitch, which is an entrepreneurial coworking hub in Chapel Hill.
The founders are seeking potential investments, and invite interested parties to reach out to Panchangam at pancha@unc.edu.
