In this AI-fueled world that is destined to touch every vertical and function of our society, nothing describes the feeling of running a company more than this quote from Will Rogers: “Even if you’re on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”
Companies of all sizes and across every sector are chasing growth to stay ahead of the competition and capture the trillions of dollars that are up for grabs. However, with marketing becoming increasingly difficult and costly, and attention being at a premium, we are seeing a demand shift towards efficient, dynamic, and outcome-based growth strategies. Recently, a wave of AI self-serve tools has emerged to challenge the traditional marketing agency model, which has seen little innovation despite billions in annual spending
But what we’ve learned is that a well-orchestrated content engine is highly complex, and there continues to be a shortage of talent, labor, and most importantly, expertise that can leverage these tools to drive tangible outcomes. That’s why, today, we are thrilled to announce our Series A investment and partnership with GrowthX, a novel approach that bridges the gap between the highest-caliber marketing expert and the massive amount of marketing tools available today.
The Fatal Flaw with Traditional Marketing
Marketing agencies are expensive, labor-intensive, and slow to innovate. Yet, the content marketing services TAM is $560 billion today, driven by massive budgets from companies with the need to outsource creativity and expertise, without a better alternative. For years, content marketing lacked personalized content, effective distribution, and real conversion at scale.
Today, more so than ever, AI is transforming the landscape. The marginal cost of creativity begins to converge at a speed and level of sophistication that we, as humans, could never have scaled to ourselves. However, adoption of AI content tools has lagged expectations and demand, given the lack of know-how in the category.
GrowthX’s vision is to solve this problem, effectively bringing A+ marketing workflow, talent, and expertise to any and every company, at an unprecedented level of efficiency and effectiveness, and all at a fraction of the price — creating a virtuous cycle that improves outcomes with every iteration.
From “Software-as-a-Service” to “Service-as-Software”
We’ve defined a new paradigm of SaaS that we believe will permeate many industries, particularly with the pace of AI innovation, termed “Service-as-Software.” We are already seeing a shift from throwing tools at a problem to creating real solutions for the customer. Advancements in LLMs have opened the gates to non-deterministic models that are highly personalized to each user, adaptable based on context, and most importantly, outcome-driven. This is increasingly critical as the market is already demanding pricing that is directly tied to outcomes, as we’ve seen in industries like customer service, and we now expect to see with marketing. The collision of an immature market with the desire of companies to run growth engines has cultivated the perfect condition for scalable content marketing as a category to be transformed.
Enter GrowthX: Revolutionizing Scalable Content Marketing
GrowthX is meeting the market where it is, providing AI- and expert-powered growth marketing workflows in the form of editorial refreshes, programmatic SEO, and other highly relevant and scalable content that customers are already gravitating towards at an unprecedented pace. Their flywheel – a robust tech-enabled tech stack, marketplace of experts, and data-driven outcomes – enables them to mature alongside the market while benefiting from economies of scale and efficiencies over time.
We first met GrowthX’s CEO and Co-Founder Marcel Santilli during his time as CMO of one of Madrona’s portfolio companies, Deepgram, where he pioneered an AI-plus-human content workflow that 24x’d traffic and 4x’d marketing contributed revenue. We believe Marcel embodies perfect founder-market fit as a customer-turned-CEO from his time at Deepgram, Scale AI, and HashiCorp, complemented by his CTO and Co-Founder Daniel Lopes, who brings technical expertise and creativity to the table from his time at Canopy and IFTTT.
The GrowthX team has grown the business at a remarkable pace (and profitably!), but felt a similar level of conviction to double down on growth at this critical inflection point. We are incredibly excited to partner with the GrowthX team as they lead the way in powering the future of growth marketing!
Our Commitment to Intelligent Applications
At Madrona, we have had the privilege of working with some of the highest caliber founders building transformational, decades-long software businesses. We are now excited to see the next wave of application-layer companies redefining what traditional workflows look like, particularly in industries that have historically been stuck behind human-intensive services without signs of innovation. We believe the category-defining companies will emerge from compelling applications of AI that reduce highly intensive manual work and labor, while at the same time, create workflows that are repeatable and eventually scalable. We also believe the most impactful companies that endure in this era are ones that bring the best of AI and humans together to deliver superior outcomes. GrowthX is a perfect manifestation of those beliefs and our conviction.
This change will not happen overnight, but we are committed to being on this journey by partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs like Marcel and Daniel, who inspire us to lean into a future that doesn’t yet exist and work furiously alongside them to make it happen. Thank you for trusting us to be your partners!
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