On Monday, Notebookan AI-powered platform that helps corporations monitor their media coverage announced a $3 million seed round co-led by Mark Cuban, Commonweal Ventures and Carpenter Capital.
The deal got here about because Clipbook founder Adam Joseph had the nerve to send a cold email that he thought no one would read, he told TechCrunch.
Joseph launched Clipbook in 2023 and has grown it to $1 million in annual revenue, he said. At this point, about a yr ago, he felt he was ready to seek out investors.
“I literally made a list of the top five media investors in the world,” Joseph recalls. Its product uses artificial intelligence to assist corporations track what the world is saying about them and their competitors in print, podcasts and social media. So he needed investors who understood the scene.
Mark Cuban, who founded media networks, starred on “Shark Tank,” wrote books, produced movies and usually interviews on television, was at the top of Joseph’s list.
So, one evening in late 2024, Joseph drank a beer for courage and sent a one-page investment offer via cold email to everyone on his list. No warm introduction.
Cuban replied himself. It seems that Cuban, busy and inundated with messages, is still searching through his own e-mails. Always looking for the next offer. “I literally invested tens of millions of dollars in emails and a lot of them paid off, turned into unicorns,” Cuban tells TechCrunch why he responded to Clipbook.
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But before Cuban opened his checkbook, he put Joseph through a series of tests. His first e-mail response “was the 20 most skeptical questions he could ever ask,” Joseph recalled.
Cuban admits he’s quite famous for this from “Shark Tank.”
“When I start fucking them, they wilt, right? They wilt or get angry to a certain extent,” Cuban explained. “It’s their baby. They don’t like being questioned, do they? But Adam just says, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”
After answering all inquiries to Cuban’s satisfaction, the billionaire asked Joseph to prove the product by providing a report on Cuban’s own child: Cost Plus Medicines. This is an online pharmacy and public profit corporation that I co-founded in 2022 that provides reasonably priced medications at a price plus 15%.
“I know how damn hard it is to do research for PR and marketing and learn about it [competitor] companies and find out what people say about your company,” Cuban explained.
That’s to not say that Clipbook doesn’t have loads of competitors that also do this job. Sprinklr is one of the most famous, but others include Sprout Social, Emplify, Hootsuite, and others.
Joseph says Clipbook is different because it was built from the ground as much as be AI-enabled. This implies that it not only searches for keywords, but also understands the context in which those words are used. He knows that media references to “cost” and “drugs” are not the same as looking for CostPlus drugs. He knows the difference between any person named “Adam Joseph” and the one who founded Clipbook.
Being native AI (somewhat than simply AI) also helps it search where other products cannot reach, equivalent to audio and video references in podcasts, Joseph says. He created the product after working in PR for the Boston Consulting Group and thus experienced first-hand the pain of media sentiment research, he said.
Joseph quickly put together a report for Cuban that basically “hit the mark,” Cuban says. He was particularly impressed when he discovered a previously unknown podcast conversation about pharmacy services.
After several days of negotiations, Cuban agreed to send Joseph a terminology sheet. The first a part of this seed round closed in early 2025, with additional investors joining over the next few months.
Joseph declined to offer TechCrunch with updated ARR numbers since its seed round – only stating that the company has grown since raising its first million. But the company now counts 200 clients as clients, including Weber Shandwick and his former employer, Boston Consulting Group, he says.