Day: December 4, 2025

• Eikona is training AI models to help companies retain their customers.
• It helps produce engaging “lifecycle marketing” content across email, SMS, and push notifications.
• Eikona just raised a $5 million seed funding round, led by StageOne Ventures.

A whole host of AI startups are emerging to help marketers create ads to acquire new customers. Tel Aviv-based Eikona is using AI to help marketers retain those customers, an area often referred to as “lifecycle marketing.”

On Thursday, Eikona announced a $5 million seed investment round, led by StageOne Ventures. Crecendo Venture Partners, Wix Ventures, and Clarim Ventures also participated.

Eikona adds a generative AI layer to the practice of A/B testing, which is when marketers compare different versions of an email, SMS, or app push notification to figure out which one yields the best results.

Eikona has developed its own AI models that generate content from scratch and create different variations based on their performance. It built its own models on top of various existing popular AI models. Marketers can plug in their brand guidelines and past performance data to help Eikona fine-tune its models to personalize content to different users.

Nir Weingarten, Eikona’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider that A/B testing can often be hard to scale. And while some marketers are beginning to use AI to help create their marketing content and ads, the prompts they use can sometimes be limited and grounded in their own human biases.

“It’s hard to understand what worked — is it because the background was red, or was it a composition of things? This is something AI is good at: combining features,” Weingarten said.

Eikona integrates into marketers’ existing automation platforms. Asked what could stop a platform like Klaviyo, Braze, or Iterable from producing Eikona-like features themselves, Weingarten said his company’s advantage as a startup is that it can move quickly.

“This is the classic innovator’s dilemma,” Weingarten said.”Hopefully, we can get to distribution before the giants get to the innovation.”

Weingarten said the company plans to invest the fresh funds in further product development.

“We spent our first two to three years devoted to finding product-market fit,” Weingarten said. “We have the notion, we’ve validated, we understand the ability to create a lot of profit for users, and now we need to make this a product that people like to use.”

In five years, Weingarten hopes Eikona will become a market leader in a new category he describes as “adaptive marketing.”

“We want it to be a standard in the world, starting in lifecycle marketing, where every message that reaches a client is adapted in a certain way to be much more intimate, more personal, much more warm, and much better performing,” Weingarten said.

Check out the pitch deck Eikona used to secure its $5 million seed investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.

Eikona’s mission is to “end generic marketing.”

Its cofounders come from AI research backgrounds, rather than marketing.

Eikona quotes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Eureka Labs founder Andrej Karpathy to explain how top thinkers in the space believe AI excels at persuasion and reinforcement learning.

Weingarten said that an age-old problem in digital marketing is determining which creative assets are working and why.

A/B testing is challenging to scale, and AI prompting can be susceptible to biases introduced by the person inputting the prompts, Eikona says.

Eikona blends AI with A/B testing, but replaces prompts with reinforcement learning — allowing the model to pursue the best results it can achieve.

Eikona employs a method called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” which means the process is automated but still involves a human in the loop to set guardrails and approve the final marketing materials.

Eikona is initially tackling the “lifecycle marketing” space, where companies use methods such as email and SMS to keep customers engaged at each stage of their interactions with a brand.

Lifecycle marketing represents a multibillion-dollar total addressable market, per Eikona.

Eikona has six clients and lining up plans to work with a further five in the coming quarter.

This slide illustrates how a large online travel agent implemented Eikona’s algorithm in its promotional emails, resulting in a 20% increase in bookings versus the baseline.

A harrowing new normal has emerged in U.S. immigration enforcement. The chase-down of immigrants, traditionally a tactic employed by the Border Patrol in remote borderlands areas, is now a blunt national strategy deployed by the federal government in America’s most populous cities. ICE agents conducting surprise raids and brutal arrests have rapidly become the symbol of an immigrant purge.

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Critics have called for ICE agents and other federal officers to drop their masks so they might be known and accountable to the public. But Trump’s hot pursuit of immigrants in American cities requires an unmasking not only of ICE operatives, but of the flimsiness of his narrative. Contrary to Trump Administration messages, there is no “invasion” necessitating the widespread suspension of basic civil liberties.

During Trump’s clampdown, Mexican communities in Chicago and Los Angeles have emerged as notable targets. But Mexican migration, far from being an invasion, proceeds from an invitation eagerly extended by the United States to Mexican migrants to address its farm labor shortage during and after World War II.

The U.S. federal government insisted on access to Mexican migrants, even when Mexico began to seriously question whether the exodus was desirable and piloted measures to impede it. Long before ICE persecuted migrants on the streets of America’s most iconic cities, the United States openly pursued them as its laborers of choice.

For more than two decades after WWII, the United States beckoned Mexicans to move north to work in American agriculture. To facilitate this migration, the United States formally enlisted the cooperation of the Mexican government, which was to recruit Mexican men and transport them north, proceeding from the understanding that migrants were to be guaranteed certain baseline wages, housing, and food provisions. The treaties outlining this cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico came to be known as the Bracero Program. All told, it brought over four million Mexicans to the United States between 1942 and 1964.

Read More: America’s Border Wall Is Bipartisan

Farmers argued such a program was necessary—at first because World War II shrank the domestic labor pool, as 16 million American men were deployed to fight Nazi Germany and Japan. But once the war ended, farmers emphasized a different rationale to keep the program going: farm labor jobs were so demanding—the hours, the climate, the constant stooping—that white Americans would never fill them. Their economic destiny, amid the U.S. post-war boom, was to join the expanding middle class, ensconced in proliferating suburban developments. Mexicans, on the other hand, were framed as being especially suited to arduous toil.

In reality, growers were attracted to the cost structure of institutionalized Mexican migration. Mexico took care of conveying migrants to the border, sparing growers expenditures on labor recruitment and transportation. Growers were also seduced by the disciplining power they gained. Migrants who engaged in labor organizing could be summarily deported back to Mexico, meaning growers could exploit migrants with less fear it might lead to labor unionism. Millions of migrants subjected themselves to this system to experience life in the United States and earn their livelihood in dollars.

Just as the United States has toggled back and forth between accepting immigrants and rejecting them, the Mexican government has also flip-flopped between enabling out-migration and restricting it. Mexico was initially on board with conveying migrants to the United States, expecting certain payoffs, including the prestige of contributing to the Allied war effort in WWII.

But by the mid-1950s, Mexican leaders could see the experiment had backfired. Far from elevating Mexico’s image, migrant workers evoked lamentable headlines in both the United States and Mexico. They were routinely mistreated by employers who flouted wage, food, and housing guarantees. “Like Animals,” announced one Mexican newspaper, describing how Mexican migrants were treated. In Mexico, the misery of migration was crystallized in popular movies such as Espaldas Mojadas and songs such as “El Canto del Bracero,” which underscored the social marginalization and labor exploitation faced by Mexicans abroad.

Bothered by such press, Mexico refused to renew the Bracero Program in 1954. It demanded significant concessions from the United States to resume diplomatic conversations—chiefly, the authority to block abusive farmers from receiving workers without waiting for lengthy investigations and U.S. approval. Under President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, Mexico began to experiment with policies to employ Mexicans internally instead. Mexican officials circulated policy proposals, penned editorials, and delivered remarks extolling possible paths to prosperity without emigration, including the formation of state-supported agrarian settlements for migrants and their families within Mexico. President Ruiz Cortines, in a moment of chest-thumping nationalism, proclaimed his government’s newfound rallying cry: “the braceros of Mexico for the fields of Mexico.”

The United States and growers, especially those in Southern California, grew concerned. Mexico not only refused to renew the Bracero Program and sanction out-migration—it actively policed the exit of Mexicans at border checkpoints, barring Mexicans from leaving and guarding them with military personnel. While Mexico completed its about-face on migration, California’s lettuce crop rotted due to a lack of farmhands.

In desperation, the U.S. Department of Labor decided to jettison Mexico’s involvement in migration altogether. It initiated a program of “unilateral hiring” to bring Mexicans to the United States. and save the lettuce crop. The DOL called on Mexican migrants to make their way to the border and into the United States, promising that jobs awaited them. Mexican officials decried this as an “open border” policy that invited migrants to trample over Mexico’s dictates.

Thousands arrived at border crossings, especially the Mexicali–Calexico crossing leading to Southern California. They overwhelmed Mexican forces stationed there. Mexican federal envoys pleaded with migrants to return home, promising eventual resettlement within Mexico, but failed to convince them. Instead, for days, migrants tussled with Mexican soldiers and auxiliary police officers, demanding to be let go, to enter the United States. Reports surfaced of soldiers beating migrants and even shooting at them. Mexico’s willingness to explore counter-migratory politics soon dissipated.

For Mexico, the embarrassment of mass out-migration was worsened by the humiliation of Mexican citizens openly rejecting its protectionism. The government adopted the position that if Mexicans wanted to leave, it was their prerogative. It assented to the U.S. proposal to move past the incident and simply renew the Bracero Program.

Read More: Rural America’s Revival Depends on Immigrants

By strategically manipulating its border policy, the United States managed to keep unfettered access to the highly desirable Mexican labor pool. More importantly, it disciplined Mexico against seeking to foment fixity. The Mexican government would never again explore counter-migratory policies with similar verve, understanding that U.S. access to Mexican labor was off limits.

Ever since, the United States has exerted great latitude in its manipulation of Mexican movement. Again in 1954, just months after it opened its borders to Mexican workers, it launched a campaign dubbed “Operation Wetback” to round up undocumented migrants. It was a farce, defined by overinflated numbers and sensationalized images of captured immigrants crammed into buses and trains. Its aim was to reassure Americans that the U.S. Border Patrol remained serious about controlling arriving immigrants. However, the United States’ truest nature—its reliance on foreign labor—was revealed in its earlier siren call to Mexican migrants who answered it despite the opposition of the Mexican government.

Trump often speaks admiringly of Operation Wetback. This selective remembering of 1954—the emphasis on the U.S. as protector of its borders, rather than on its involvement in securing Mexican labor to begin with—sidesteps a deeper truth. Migration control is illusory so long as employers who seek a foreign workforce—whether as guest workers or undocumented laborers—escape the scrutiny that migrants face daily.

From the 1950s to today, U.S. immigration restriction has contented itself with sporadically intimidating migrants; all the while, employers, thanks to their lobbying power, have remained relatively untouchable.

In Trump’s view, poorer nations manipulatively dump their people into the United States. But, while the United States was able to bend Mexico to its will in the mid-20th century, the truth is more resilient. Mexican immigration flourished with the encouragement—indeed, the insistence—of the United States. To pretend otherwise is to feign shock at a harvest it intentionally planted and from which it has continually reaped rewards.

Irvin Ibarguen is an assistant professor of history at New York University and the author of Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940-1980.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.