The AI conversation today is dominated by infrastructure, and the question of how enterprises generate ROI from AI gets far less attention. But, in the Reasoning Revolution, the largest amount of value creation is expected to be in the enterprise. Today’s AI infrastructure boom is very exciting but let’s anticipate where the majority of value will be captured. In the SpaceX S-1, Elon Musk and team understood estimated a total addressable market of $22.7 trillion spent on AI for business with the vast majority in larger enterprises.
It is not surprising then that, when Doug Tallmadge and Deip Kumar left SpaceX after helping build and launch Starlink to its first 500,000 customer, they focused on solving enterprise agentic execution challenges. In founding Gradial they teamed up with amazing co-founders, Anup, Anish and Vikas to create AI-native ways for enterprises to execute on cross-functional marketing workflows. They call their solution a new system of work for enterprise marketing.
The Gradial team understands that you need to build trust with enterprise customers by focusing on specific problems and delivering compelling and scalable solutions. They started with the multidimensional workflows around updating enterprise websites for Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, T-Mobile, Kaiser Permanente, Vanguard, Cisco and many more. These customers have complex needs and expect excellence at scale. Three years and tens of millions in revenue later, Gradial is expanding beyond website content execution to campaign execution and orchestration across channels, including AI search and email. They power this system with agentic content infrastructure wrapped in a purposeful harness. The timing reflects a deeper shift in how marketing works. AI search is collapsing discovery, agents are emerging as the predominant digital audience, and the execution models and infrastructure built for an earlier era cannot keep pace.
The company has been able to grow so rapidly by building an enterprise marketing harness which allows them to leverage all the emerging technologies in the AI-native world. As we are seeing in countless cases today, the use of a well-built harness allows customers to realize greater value, faster, and with less effort.
The harness wraps around the agents, models and tooling so that end customers can most easily and intuitively benefit from enterprise grade AI in the applications they use today. Technologically, harnesses include memory, context, integrations, and optimizations for the end customer experience.
Gradial’s approach is unique in how they build enterprise grade governance, customizations and brand guardrails at the harness layer. This is a key differentiator and vitally important for Fortune 500 marketing organizations that cannot compromise on how their brand shows up across channels. Gradial also allows you to work across underlying models and tools which sit below them in the modern AI stack. They use models from Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI and others to deliver the best value for their customers similar to how Cursor delivers value to software development teams.
Based on human and agentic prompts, the harness can manage the complexities of models, tools and context to help optimize cost and quality of AI outputs. In an AI world where the most important model is the business model, Gradial is leading the way innovating for enterprise CMO’s and their organizations.
Having spoken with many enterprise marketing leaders over the years, I know that they are constantly balancing the desire for technology-driven innovation with their responsibility to strengthen and protect the brand. Gradial is helping many world-class CMO’s and their companies get that balance right by driving a very clear ROI on AI, including a 20x speed up in time to market for content operations in the enterprise!
Today, Gradial has announced a $65M Series C led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors. We have been day one investors in Gradial, having led their Seed and Series A rounds, and working deeply with Doug and the team as they’ve rapidly scaled.
We are delighted to welcome Insight Partners to the Gradial investor group and Teddie Wardi to the board. We have worked closely and successfully with the Insight team on several companies including Smartsheet, Jama, and Visual Layer. With the recent addition of Sunny Gupta to the board, who is an incredible leader in enterprise software solutions like Apptio, we have a dream team of advisors and partners to help the company realize its full potential.
At Smartsheet, we helped fellow Dartmouth graduates build a company that grew to over $1 billion in annual revenue, $200 million in free cash flow and $8 billion in value. I am delighted to be working with another exceptional Dartmouth founding team who have boundless energy and drive to serve customers and impact the world. I believe Gradial will substantially help enterprise CMOs and their teams harness the creativity and customization that AI can unlock for customers. I won’t be surprised if they exceed those impressive Smartsheet metrics in a rapid, AI-native manner!
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