Two Seattle startups with deeply intertwined histories are combining forces, as B2B marketing automation company Inflection.io 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, collaborated professionally, and invested in each other’s companies. Schoenfeld is joining Inflection as Chief Marketing Officer, while Keyplay co-founder Andrew Rothbart joins as a senior member of the engineering team. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Keyplay had raised $3 million in a seed round in 2022, while Inflection has raised approximately $14 million to date, including 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 recently opened a new office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighbourhood, where its chief executive, chief marketing officer, SVP of Customer Experience, and senior engineers are now based.
Schoenfeld said the acquisition reflects a significant shift in the B2B software market since Keyplay was founded. By the middle of last year, he had concluded that account scoring was becoming a feature rather than a standalone business, and that the rise of AI agents was consolidating the market around a smaller number of core platforms. “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. He determined that Keyplay needed to attach itself to a broader platform rather than attempt to become one itself.
Inflection is positioning itself as that platform, building an AI-native alternative to Marketo, the B2B marketing automation software that has dominated its category for two decades. Bird knows the market intimately. He founded Seattle marketing analytics company Bizible in 2011, which Marketo acquired in 2018. Marketo 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.
The shared history between Bird and Schoenfeld runs deep. Schoenfeld, previously co-founder of Simply Measured, the Seattle social media analytics startup acquired by Sprout Social, sat on Bizible’s board during its growth and acquisition and later invested in Inflection’s seed round. Bird, in turn, invested in Keyplay’s seed round. Schoenfeld described the cross-investment as a natural extension of a long friendship rather than a driver of the deal itself, noting that it helped both sides assess strategic fit far more quickly than two strangers could have. Talks became serious in January and the deal closed in mid-March.
Inflection plans to integrate Keyplay’s account scoring and intelligence into its platform beginning 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.
