Leipzig's Birdsview takes flight with €2.5 million Seed to scale Avys, its AI email marketing agent for online shops

Birdsview, a Leipzig-based startup behind Avys, an AI email marketing agent for online shops, announced today that it has raised €2.5 million in a Seed round to expand Avys.

This round was led by Fortino Ventures and Newion. It was initially backed by TGFS in its pre-Seed phase.

“Avys isn’t a better tool – it’s the worker. We started Birdsview after running a CRM agency ourselves, the exact business model Avys is built to make obsolete. We lived inside this problem for years, and now we’re ending it. The future of CRM isn’t better tooling for humans to work faster – it’s an agent that does the work,” said Ozan Brochwitz-Tuerker, co-founder, Birdsview. Founded in 2023 by data scientists Tim Kuesters and Ozan Brochwitz-Tuerker, Birdsview build Avys, an AI system that runs e-commerce retention messaging end to end. The company claims that it can handle work that has traditionally required both CRM software and the agency that operates it.

The company states that retailers depend on repeat purchases, and direct messaging channels like email remain the most reliable channel for bringing customers back. It further notes that although customer acquisition costs have increased by 222% over the past eight years, the core retention software used by most retailers remains largely unchanged. It continues to depend on human effort.

It highlights that traditional email software provides the tools but leaves the work to the user, requiring a dedicated person for segmenting customers, establishing delivery rules, and crafting the actual message content.

As the product catalogue grows, so do the complications involved, and many retailers hire an agency to run it, typically at three to five times the price of the software licence.

“They pay twice: once for the tool, once for the people to make it useful. And even with a full agency team, the math caps out at managing customer segments. Nobody is writing to each customer individually – there aren’t enough hours,” said Birdsview.

The company argues that the problem persists by design. Agencies are the incumbents’ largest sales channel, accounting for roughly 40% of revenue, according to the company’s estimate.

A vendor that automated the agency away would be dismantling its own distribution, which is why, in Birdsview’s view, the companies selling the tooling have little incentive to change it.

The startup claims that Avys is built to do that work itself. It states that Avys reads a retailer’s catalogue the way an experienced marketer would, decides what to say to each customer and when, and writes an individual email in the brand’s voice.

Birdsview focuses on the layer beneath agentic decisions as the difficult-to-copy aspect. Instead of just viewing a product as a name and price, Avys analyses how each item connects to the overall catalogue, the need it addresses, the most effective sales approach, and the likely re-purchase timeframe.

The company built this product-intelligence layer alongside its first hundred customers and reports that it now spans 1.2 million labelled products across 60 industries, learning from 52 million email interactions a month. Birdsview’s position is that the data can’t simply be bought, and grows more valuable with every customer added.

It also noted that brands using Avys see 3x more clicks and 8x more revenue per email. It highlighted that prominent market leaders in retail have replaced both their email tool and their agency with it.

“Birdsview’s agentic solution empowers retailers with a revenue generator on auto-pilot – making legacy SaaS and agency services redundant. I am excited to be partnering with Ozan and Tim as they disrupt the $56Bn retention SaaS and services market,” said Wouter Goossens, Partner, Fortino Ventures.