From Day 1 in 2023, we’ve believed in Gradial’s vision to leverage AI agents for the enterprise starting with enterprise marketing operations. Madrona led Gradial’s Seed round announced in February 2024, and doubled down by leading the Series A earlier this year. Now, less than nine months later, we’re thrilled to continue our partnership by investing in their $35M Series B round, led by VMG Partners with participation from Pruven Capital.
Gradial’s momentum over the past nine months has been remarkable: growing from an emerging innovator to a trusted partner for global enterprises and proving that AI can drive real ROI at scale for Fortune 1000 brands like Amazon, Prudential, Microsoft and T-Mobile.
Gradial’s platform is defining a new category: agentic marketing operations. While early AI tools focused on generating content, Gradial built its foundation on managing the content supply chain — the operational backbone that moves marketing from brief to customer experience. Their AI agents automate the execution layer of marketing: authoring, redesigns, QA, and campaign orchestration across existing enterprise systems and workflows. Gradial’s AI agents live inside those workflows, reasoning through complex steps like a true digital teammate. The result: faster execution, tighter compliance, and consistent brand experiences at scale that enable greater creativity and customization.
Gradial’s success demonstrates an approach to AI startup success that we’ve seen repeated among leading AI companies. We call it winning the wedge, and it’s about finding the narrowest possible entry point that reveals the broadest possible opportunity.
For Gradial, that wedge was marketing execution: a problem space dense with complexity, data, and dollars, where even small gains create outsized enterprise impact. By solving that first challenge with measurable results, Gradial established trust at the core of the enterprise stack. From that foundation, they are now expanding horizontally: reasoning across adjacent workflows and verticals to become a critical layer in how modern enterprises operate and achieve impact. This is how transformative platforms emerge: not by chasing breadth from the start, but by earning it through depth.
Founders and AI leaders can see an even deeper signal in Gradial’s success: they are at the vanguard of the Reasoning Revolution: where intelligent systems evolve from tools of output to partners in thought and action.
Gradial’s agents don’t just assist; they perceive, decide, and coordinate in the flow of real work. They represent a new class of reasoning machines that work alongside humans to manage complexity, turn feedback into foresight, and compound improvement over time. This is the beginning of a new enterprise architecture—one where systems themselves participate in reasoning flywheels that connect data to action and action back to insight. Gradial is not simply automating workflows; it’s helping redefine how intelligence operates inside the enterprise.
It’s the kind of company that perfectly aligns with Madrona’s long-term belief that intelligent applications will rewire the enterprise from the inside out—one reasoning system at a time.
At Madrona, we’ve long believed that intelligent, AI-driven applications will rewire the enterprise. Gradial’s founders, Doug Tallmadge, Deip Kumar, Anup Chamrajnagar, and Anish Chadalavada, continue to demonstrate exceptional vision, technical depth, and customer empathy. Watching them turn that vision into sustained growth and real enterprise transformation has been inspiring.
We’re excited to continue this journey with the Gradial team as they define what the next generation of enterprise marketing operations will look like!
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