Two Seattle startups with intertwined histories are joining forces.
Inflection.io, a B2B marketing automation company, announced Wednesday that it has acquired Keyplay, a startup that helps sales teams identify and score target accounts.
The deal reunites Inflection CEO Aaron Bird and Keyplay CEO Adam Schoenfeld, who have known each other for 15 years, and collaborated and invested in each other’s companies.
Schoenfeld is joining Inflection as CMO, and his Keyplay co-founder Andrew Rothbart is joining the company as a senior member of the engineering team.
As Schoenfeld put it, Inflection is building the platform he wishes he’d had as a marketer, putting him in the role of both marketing leader and target customer for the product.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Keyplay had raised $3 million in a seed round in 2022. Inflection has raised about $14 million to date, most recently a $7.6 million round in June 2024.
The combined company will have 47 employees globally, with team members across North America and an office in Bangalore, India. Inflection just opened a new office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, where its CEO, CMO, SVP of Customer Experience, and senior engineers are based.
The backstory: Schoenfeld said the acquisition reflects how the market has shifted since Keyplay was founded in 2022, focusing on helping B2B companies identify their best target accounts. He came to realize, around the middle of last year, that this was more feature than company.
He explained that it “became clear that buyers are driving toward a smaller number of core platforms built for AI agents. I didn’t see a path for Keyplay to become a consolidator.”
It was a hard thing to admit after building his career as an entrepreneur by capitalizing on and operating within niches, but he ultimately concluded that Keyplay needed to attach itself to a broader platform.
“When agents start building campaigns, writing emails, picking audiences, the question stops being ‘what’s the best account scoring tool?’ and becomes ‘does my execution layer have the context it needs to act?’ ” Schoenfeld said.
Bigger platform: Inflection is positioning itself to provide that context, as an AI-native alternative to Marketo, the B2B marketing automation software that has dominated the category for two decades.
Bird knows the market (and Marketo) well. He founded Bizible, a Seattle marketing analytics company, in 2011. Marketo acquired Bizible in 2018 and was itself acquired by Adobe later that year for $4.75 billion.
Bird served as SVP of Product at Adobe Marketo before leaving to launch Inflection in 2021 with former Bizible colleagues Dave Rigotti and Vic Davis.
Answering questions about the acquisition, Bird said he was “highly motivated” to bring in Schoenfeld, Rothbart, and their team, recognizing how they could accelerate Inflection in both marketing and engineering, while adding more senior talent to the startup’s Seattle office.
He said Rothbart has been “on the leading edge of how modern engineering teams should work with AI, and he has deep domain expertise right in our sweet spot — building and scaling intelligence-driven GTM systems.”
Shared history: Schoenfeld, previously co-founder of Simply Measured, the Seattle social media analytics startup acquired by Sprout Social, was on Bizible’s board during its growth and acquisition, and invested in Inflection’s $5 million seed round.
Bird, in turn, invested in Keyplay’s $3 million seed round.
Schoenfeld called the cross-investment “a funny small-world scenario,” noting that their long friendship naturally led to supporting each other’s startups as angel investors.
“This didn’t have a direct impact on the deal,” Schoenfeld said. “But because we’d been closely following each other from the start, in both directions, it helped us get up to speed on the strategic fit much faster than two strangers would have.”
Bird had floated the idea of a deal early in Keyplay’s life, making offhand comments like “someday we should buy you.” Keyplay was engaged with a few possible buyers, but Inflection rose to the top of the list. Talks got serious in January, and the deal closed in mid-March.
What’s next: Inflection plans to integrate Keyplay’s account scoring and intelligence into its platform starting this quarter, giving its AI agents built-in knowledge of which accounts to target and why. Existing Keyplay customers will continue using the standalone product for now, with a path to access its capabilities inside Inflection over time.
