AI-based B2B marketing solution company BusinessCanvas has reached break-even about 6 years after its founding. Given the challenging environment for B2B startups in South Korea, that is an impressive result.

Growth accelerated after it introduced its account intelligence solution Athena in January and led to reaching break-even. The company also made clear it was not a one-off achievement. BusinessCanvas CEO Woojin Kim (김우진) expressed confidence, saying sales in the second half of this year and next year will grow even faster.

Athena can be summed up as a solution that uses AI to find people who can help B2B companies pursuing overseas expansion with sales, and, if needed, connects them to in-person meetings. It uses data and AI to determine target companies, timing and access routes. It is a subscription-based global go-to-market service that takes responsibility through to arranging C-level sales meetings.

The company is targeting large and small domestic companies interested in entering overseas markets with a solution that combines AI-powered digital capabilities and human know-how. Six LG Group affiliates and a Samsung Group affiliate also use Athena, it said.

Athena analyses public data from social media, podcasts and websites and data in paid databases to fit a customer's business context, and finds people who can help global sales. Actual meetings are handled by BusinessCanvas specialists known as hunters, based on the Athena engine.

In a time when automating as much as possible with AI can look like innovation, the need for a human touch may seem less cutting-edge at first glance. Kim sees it differently. He said the core of an AI marketing platform lies not in infrastructure but in the last mile that faces customers, where people still play an important role.

Kim said, "AI already handles data processing. The key is whether you have a system in place in areas AI does poorly. What AI can do cannot be a moat. Meetings are the last layer in marketing, and execution needed for meetings is hard to replace with AI. Competitiveness in this area is Athena's moat." He said finding data on the web does not face high barriers to entry, but enabling people to meet directly cannot be done without tacit knowledge of customers and the market.

Differences between Clay, known as a sales-focused AI startup, and Athena also come from the last mile. If Clay is closer to infrastructure that provides data based on AI, Athena is a service closer to the last mile that arranges meetings based on data analysis. Kim reiterated, saying, "Athena focuses on the last mile close to customer touchpoints. Added value is not in data but in producing results and executing."

Athena is based on human and AI collaboration, but looking at the details of the division of roles, it is evolving in a direction where the AI portion keeps growing. Kim said AI covers close to 80 percent, including sending messages and drafting playbooks containing tailored analysis of customers. He said the AI portion will continue to rise, and even if people keep handling the last mile, AI will take on much of it.

In the AI era, Kim also stressed that the importance of people lies not in domain expertise but in understanding data and AI. With Athena, domain expertise in a specific field matters less than it used to thanks to AI. Kim said, "AI is actually better at market analysis. What matters is which databases to bring in, and what prompts to use to produce what outputs." He said, "If you know AI well, industry expertise is becoming a problem that can be overcome."

Since its founding, BusinessCanvas has transformed into a company specialising in global go-to-market services after several pivots. Its first product was an integrated document work software called Typed. It later introduced a customer relationship management solution, and Growth Lab, which consults and also executes search engine optimisation, account-based marketing, website building and sales strategy design for customers. The CRM solution Recatch is characterised by not requiring users to type information directly into a CRM such as Salesforce. The company said it also creates meeting minutes based on transcripts and enters information automatically.

BusinessCanvas is also pursuing expansion into the global market with Athena. Kim said, "We are also hiring local hunters in places such as the United States," adding, "We will enhance Athena in a more cost-efficient way so that more domestic companies can move into exports."