Assaf Baciu

President and Co-Founder Persado

Last Reviewed: September 27, 2026

Executive Summary

Assaf Baciu is President and co-founder of Persado, the New York-headquartered company whose Motivation AI platform generates and optimises the wording of marketing messages for large consumer brands. He and chief executive Alex Vratskides started Persado in 2012 out of work they were doing at the company Upstream, where Baciu ran product. He came to that from product strategy at Nuance Communications, and before it BeVocal. His job at Persado has always been about the product. He was chief operating officer until at least 2023, and he now holds the title of president, which also covers customer onboarding, campaign delivery and technical services.

Career Highlights

• President and Co-Founder of Persado, per the company’s own leadership page.
• Co-founded Persado in 2012 with Alex Vratskides, from language-optimisation work that began at Upstream.
• Served as Persado’s Chief Operating Officer, the title the company used for him as late as March 2023.
• Vice President of Product at Upstream, where Persado’s core technology originated.
• Senior director of product strategy at Nuance Communications, responsible for on-demand and mobile solutions, having joined from BeVocal when Nuance acquired it in 2007.

Professional Journey

Baciu’s background is in voice and mobile products. He was at BeVocal and moved to Nuance Communications when Nuance acquired BeVocal in 2007. At Nuance, the speech and imaging software supplier, he was a senior director of product strategy responsible for developing on-demand and mobile solutions.

He then became Vice President of Product at Upstream. This is where Persado began. As Baciu tells it, he and Alex Vratskides noticed that the response rates of text messages changed even when the wording was altered only slightly. Because an SMS has a fixed character limit, they started treating a message as a mathematical problem with a finite number of alternatives, and they saw that the right algorithm could find the best ones. That idea became Persado, which they founded in 2012.

Persado has since grown into what it calls a Motivation AI platform. It fine-tunes a foundation model on data from what the company says are about a million message A/B tests, and it uses machine learning to adjust copy for individual customers or segments. The company names customers including JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Ally, Dropbox and Marks & Spencer. Its board includes representatives of StarVest Partners, Bain Capital Ventures and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity.

Baciu has always overseen Persado’s product portfolio. In 2022 and early 2023 the company called him its Chief Operating Officer. By late 2024 he was President, and the job had grown to cover customer onboarding, campaign delivery management, the company’s Center of Enablement programmes and technical services. Vratskides remains chief executive.

Education

University of San Francisco

MBA

Sorbonne, Paris

Master’s, Social Psychology