Adobe Quietly Buys Rilo, an IIT Duo's AI Marketing Agent Startup, in Its Second India Deal

Adobe has acquired Rilo, a Bengaluru based AI martech startup backed by Peak XV Partners, in a deal involving technology licensing and the acquisition of its team, marking the design software giant's second known acquisition of an Indian company.

The deal was confirmed by Adobe to TechCrunch, though the company declined to comment beyond that confirmation, and financial terms were not disclosed by either party. Rilo had previously raised 1 million dollars in seed funding from Peak XV Partners, DeVC, and Day Zero Ventures at a reported valuation of 10 million dollars. As part of the transaction, Rilo's existing investors are expected to receive an exit, while Adobe integrates the startup's intellectual property and onboards its six‑person team.

Rilo was co‑founded in September 2025 by IIT Bombay batchmates Dhruv Jaglan and Georgi Boby. The startup's original product let prosumers and non‑technical users describe complex workflows in plain English, with AI agents then building and executing those workflows autonomously across hundreds of connected tools. Rilo eventually evolved into what its founders described as a platform for "AI employees" specifically for marketing and go‑to‑market teams, handling tasks spanning competitive intelligence, content repurposing and distribution, prospecting, LinkedIn outreach, Reddit marketing, social content, campaign research, and sales call analysis. That broad, workflow‑automation positioning led some observers to describe Rilo as an early competitor to Claude Cowork, Anthropic's own agentic work platform, within the narrower marketing and go‑to‑market use case.

The startup's growth was notably fast for a company barely a year old at the time of its acquisition: Rilo scaled to more than 10,000 users within months of launch, according to Inc42, a pace of adoption that likely factored into Adobe's decision to move on an acquisition so soon after the startup's founding rather than allowing it to continue raising independently.

Day Zero Ventures managing partner Rahul Gupta, one of Rilo's investors, framed the speed of the outcome as validation of the underlying product. "We're very excited that Rilo has been acquired by Adobe in such a short span of time," Gupta said. "Its workflow builder was ahead of its time and will be extremely valuable to a large company like Adobe, helping improve customer engagement and productivity." DeVC's Rahul Mathur told TechCrunch that Rilo could specifically fit into Adobe's customer experience and marketing suite, helping the company handle complex workflows and giving Adobe's customers greater visibility into the actions AI agents take on their behalf across the platform.

Following the acquisition, Rilo will shut down as a standalone service, meaning its platform will no longer be available to existing customers once the transition is complete, a common outcome in acqui‑hire style deals where the acquiring company is primarily interested in the technology and team rather than continuing to operate the acquired product independently.

The deal fits into a broader strategic push by Adobe to deepen its position in agentic marketing and AI‑powered automation at a moment when the underlying technology behind marketing workflows is changing rapidly. Enterprises increasingly use AI tools to automate the creation, deployment, and tracking of marketing campaigns, extract action items directly from meetings and calls, and optimize brand visibility across AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, a shift that has pushed established software vendors like Adobe to either build or acquire agentic capabilities quickly rather than risk falling behind. Rilo's technology is expected to strengthen Adobe's existing customer experience and marketing products specifically as the company targets its larger enterprise customers with more sophisticated, automation‑driven offerings.

This marks Adobe's second confirmed acquisition of an Indian startup, following its 2023 purchase of Rephrase.ai, a Bengaluru based text‑to‑video AI company whose technology helped influencers and marketers create digital avatars and synthetic video content. Adobe has also been active more broadly in AI‑adjacent acquisitions, having announced plans in 2025 to acquire SEO optimization platform Semrush for 1.9 billion dollars, a considerably larger deal that signals Adobe's willingness to spend heavily where it sees strategic gaps in its AI and marketing technology stack, even as smaller deals like the Rilo acquisition let the company quickly absorb promising early‑stage technology and talent at comparatively modest cost.

The acquisition also reflects a broader pattern taking shape across India's AI startup ecosystem, where a wave of new‑age companies are building genuinely novel AI use cases from scratch, only for larger technology companies to acquire the most promising of them once they demonstrate meaningful user traction, rather than compete directly against them in the market. Enterprise AI startup Nurix AI, led by Mukesh Bansal, announced plans in July to acquire Verloop.io to expand its own voice AI capabilities, illustrating that this consolidation dynamic is not limited to acquisitions by large US technology companies but is increasingly playing out among India's own AI‑native startups as well. Whether Rilo's technology and team ultimately move the needle on Adobe's broader agentic marketing ambitions, competing against rivals including Canva, which has also bolstered its own marketing portfolio through acquisitions and new launches, as well as Amazon, Google, and Meta, all of which have built their own AI‑powered marketing infrastructure, will likely become clearer only once Rilo's capabilities are fully integrated into Adobe's existing enterprise product suite.