Adobe has acquired India-based marketing intelligence startup Rilo in a deal that combines technology licensing with the acquisition of the startup’s six-member team, giving the software giant additional technology for automating increasingly complex marketing and customer-experience workflows.
The financial terms were not disclosed. Adobe confirmed the acquisition but declined to provide further details.
The transaction marks Adobe’s second acquisition from India after the company bought video technology startup Rephrase.ai in 2023, and comes as Adobe intensifies its push to integrate artificial intelligence into its marketing, creative and customer-experience products.
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Rilo was founded in 2025 by Indian Institute of Technology alumni Georgi Boby and Dhruv Jaglan. The startup raised $1 million from Peak XV Partners, DeVC and Day Zero Ventures at a reported valuation of $10 million.
A source told TechCrunch that Rilo’s investors will receive an exit as part of the transaction, while Adobe plans to incorporate some of Rilo’s intellectual property into its products. Rilo itself will shut down following the acquisition, and its service will no longer be available to existing customers.
The startup developed software designed to allow go-to-market teams to build and automate customized workflows covering tasks such as competitor intelligence, content repurposing and distribution, and sales-call analysis.
Its technology also allowed businesses to construct workflows similar to those emerging around AI agents, enabling software to move beyond generating content or answering questions and instead execute sequences of tasks based on instructions.
That capability is expected to become a big boost to Adobe as businesses seek to automate marketing operations across multiple stages of a campaign, from content creation and distribution to performance monitoring and follow-up actions.
Adobe Targets The Next Phase Of AI-Powered Marketing
The acquisition reflects a broader shift in enterprise software toward agentic workflows, where AI systems can coordinate multiple tasks rather than operate as standalone assistants.
Marketing teams, for example, now want AI systems that can analyze a sales call, identify follow-up actions, generate appropriate content, distribute that content across relevant channels, and monitor the resulting engagement. Companies are also looking for tools that can track how their brands appear in responses generated by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
Rilo’s workflow technology could give Adobe additional infrastructure for addressing those requirements within its broader customer-experience and marketing ecosystem.
Rahul Mathur of DeVC said Rilo could fit into Adobe’s customer-experience and marketing products by handling complex workflows and giving customers greater visibility into actions performed across Adobe’s platform.
The strategic value for Adobe therefore extends beyond acquiring a six-person team. The company is gaining intellectual property that could accelerate development of AI-driven automation without having to build every component internally.
Rahul Gupta, managing partner at Day Zero Ventures, said Rilo’s workflow-builder technology was “way ahead of the curve” and could help Adobe improve customer experience and productivity.
Adobe has been expanding its marketing technology portfolio through acquisitions as it attempts to connect its creative tools with the increasingly automated digital-marketing stack.
In 2025, the company agreed to acquire SEO and digital-marketing platform Semrush for $1.9 billion. That transaction gave Adobe access to technology focused on search visibility, content optimization, and digital marketing intelligence.
Rilo adds a different layer to that strategy: workflow automation.
The combination could potentially allow Adobe to move from helping customers create and optimize marketing content toward helping them automate the operational processes surrounding that content.
AI has been changing how marketing organizations are structured. Generative AI has made content production faster, but businesses still need systems capable of deciding what should be produced, where it should be distributed, who should act on the results, and how performance should be measured.
Adobe’s broader opportunity is to make its Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud and AI capabilities part of that automated workflow.
Competition Is Intensifying
Adobe is not pursuing this market alone.
Canva has expanded its marketing capabilities through acquisitions and new product development, while Amazon, Google and Meta have built sophisticated AI-powered advertising and marketing infrastructure.
The competition is shifting from individual creative and advertising applications toward integrated AI systems that can manage larger portions of the marketing lifecycle.
This creates both an opportunity and a strategic challenge for Adobe. Its existing customer base provides a major distribution advantage, but the company must ensure that AI agents and workflow tools become deeply integrated into products customers already use rather than emerging as disconnected features.
Rilo’s technology could help accelerate that transition.
The acquisition also underpins the growing importance of India’s startup ecosystem as a source of specialized AI and enterprise software talent. Rilo was founded only in 2025 and raised $1 million before being acquired, illustrating how quickly large technology companies are moving to absorb small teams with technology aligned with strategic AI priorities.
The transaction is ultimately less about Rilo’s existing customer base, which will disappear with the shutdown of the startup, than about its technology and people. Adobe is effectively buying a compact engineering team and intellectual property that could be incorporated into a much larger software platform.
As Adobe competes to make AI a central layer of its marketing and customer-experience business, acquisitions such as Rilo’s could provide a faster route to agentic automation while allowing the company to leverage its existing enterprise distribution and customer relationships.