A thousand shops can share a logo. Getting them to sound like a thousand places where somebody is actually paying attention is another undertaking. Someone has to answer the reviews, update the hours and put something useful on the local page. The corporate campaign may be immaculate. The branch down the road still needs to tell people it is open.
Afif Khoury has spent much of his working life on that small, multiplying inconvenience. As co-founder and CEO of SOCi, he builds software for brands whose marketing must happen in many places at once. His subject is local, his organizational problem enormous. A single unanswered question becomes a considerable workload when every location has one.
In September 2026, SOCi reported more than 412,000 deployed AI agents. It is an arresting number. But to understand Khoury, go back to a period when the enterprise was smaller and the bill was more personal: the first 18 months, which he says he funded himself.
Eighteen months on his own tab
In 2012, brands were chasing audiences on their national Facebook pages. Khoury and his co-founder were watching something less conspicuous: the growing importance of local pages and local search. They began working through what it would take for a brand to maintain hundreds or thousands of local social presences, with regular engagement at each.
The proposal was awkward to finance. Investors favored products that did one thing. SOCi’s idea required a broad system, involving local managers, shared material, permissions and approvals. The infrastructure was immature, and brands were not organized for the work. Khoury kept paying while the company tried to make the idea concrete.
There is a useful amount of friction in this origin story. A platform has to handle the annoying dependencies between tasks. Strip those out for a neater pitch, and the customer may still be left doing the connecting. Khoury’s bet required staying with the untidy whole.
Khoury’s account of how long he funded SOCi before outside backing.
A lawyer changes seats
He had already occupied several seats around the startup table. Khoury studied at UC San Diego, earned a law degree at Northwestern in 2002 and attended Kellogg School of Management. His legal career included Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Gunderson Dettmer, firms deeply involved in the business of technology companies and their investors.
He moved into venture investing, establishing Scatter Ventures in 2010 and later working through Axon Ventures. He also founded FanGate Media, a social-media software business serving large companies. By the time SOCi began, the founder had experience with both the legal machinery surrounding young companies and the commercial possibilities of social platforms.
That background gives the self-funding episode a particular flavor. He had been on the side that evaluates businesses. Now his own business was waiting for a favorable evaluation. Knowing how the room works does not guarantee that the room will agree with you.
The trouble with pressing publish
In 2014, Khoury explained SOCi through content. Scheduling was available; finding something people would care about was harder. MeetSOCI gathered social-content performance data and used a ten-point scoring system to help customers identify material that had already earned a response.
His example was pleasingly specific: how should a marketer compare a post with ten likes and two comments against one with four likes and four comments? Counting activity was easy. Deciding what the counts meant demanded more thought.
He also complained about companies that posted busily for a while, became discouraged and abandoned their pages. Others kept issuing promotional invitations so dull that there was little for a reader to say. A publishing schedule can be perfectly maintained and still feel like someone has left a photocopier in charge.
By 2021, Khoury was describing the deeper machinery: “We are a permission and workflow platform”. The phrasing is revealing. Somewhere between headquarters and a local manager, someone must decide what can be published, who can change it and whose approval is required. Software has to accommodate those relationships before it can make them efficient.
“We are a permission and workflow platform”
Afif Khoury, 2021
That year, SOCi raised an $80 million Series D and acquired Brandify. The company was expanding its ability to serve brands across local marketing channels. The original question about many Facebook pages had grown into a wider organizational challenge, with more money and more capabilities attached.
The customers he stopped chasing
Persistence can explain why a company survives its first rejection. It does less to explain how a founder handles growth. In a 2025 conversation with Eric Weiss, Khoury discussed a difficult adjustment: giving up two-thirds of sales opportunities to improve retention.
The decision gives the story a needed complication. Staying with the original problem did not mean accepting every route to revenue. He described the importance of customer success, experienced leaders and systems capable of supporting expansion. A customer won on the wrong terms can leave a company with work it is poorly arranged to perform.
For a founder who had waited for the market to catch up, narrowing the market was a demanding next step. It required treating some apparent demand as a distraction. The discipline is easy to admire after the fact and rather less entertaining when opportunities are being removed from the forecast.
By May 2025, SOCi said it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and employed more than 500 people across six countries. That month, Khoury was named the San Diego Business Journal’s CEO of the Year in its Private Large Company category.
Recurring revenue describes an ongoing relationship. Customers must keep finding enough value to return. Against that background, his emphasis on retention belongs near the center of the profile. The job continued after the contract was signed.
An invitation to the CEO’s chair
One of Khoury’s more personable public remarks concerns a colleague who might want his job. His response includes an invitation: “Let me put you under my wing”. The ambition, in his telling, is something to help develop.
His leadership discussions also return to hiring people with stronger expertise than his own and balancing founder involvement with trust. Those are practical tensions in a company that no longer fits around a small table. The founder cannot remain the answer to every question without becoming a queue.
There are other people in SOCi’s story, too. Alo Sarv is its co-founder and chief technology officer. MomentFeed founder Rob Reed joined in 2020 as a strategic advisor for enterprise brands, bringing experience from another company focused on local marketing. Reed later interviewed Khoury on his Clicks 2 Bricks podcast.
The connection matters because the problem extends beyond a product interface. A chain’s central team and its local operators have different responsibilities. Building for both takes technical work and familiarity with how brands actually organize themselves. Khoury has assembled a company around that shared difficulty.
Teach the software the job
By ReImagine 2024, Khoury was asking marketers to look beyond the consumer uses of generative AI. The focus was applied AI inside the systems used to execute marketing. At the event, SOCi brought together customers and practitioners discussing search, reviews and local social content.
His ambition became more explicit in his writing after ReImagine 2025: software should be trained to perform work. SOCi’s proposed workforce learns a brand’s voice and standards, then carries out recurring tasks through agents focused on search, reputation and social media.
The appeal is easiest to understand at store level. A review arrives. A listing needs attention. A post needs local context. Each item is manageable; their accumulation is the problem. Khoury wants the system to carry more of that recurring load, with marketers setting direction and the rules of the brand.
The company’s September 2026 tally put annual localized marketing tasks above 27 million. These are SOCi’s reported operating figures. They indicate the scale of the work it says its agents perform; they also make a useful distinction between a software demonstration and the repeated jobs a business expects to be completed.
The underlying ambition has been consistent across Khoury’s interviews. On Clicks 2 Bricks in January 2024, the discussion already centered on changing software from a tool into a business partner. His later language gives that partner more responsibility.
Somebody has to come back next month
On October 13, 2026, SOCi introduced its Dynamic Pages Skill. It uses search and local signals to recommend changes to location pages, including metadata, content and frequently asked questions. Teams preview and approve recommendations before publication. The system is also designed to avoid unnecessary changes to pages already performing well.
This is a particularly apt development in Khoury’s story. He started by noticing local pages. Fourteen years later, a new product addresses the fact that those pages need revisiting. A business can launch an excellent page and still leave it answering last season’s questions.
The broad ambition contains a modest recurring appointment: come back, check what changed, do the maintenance. It is the sort of work that rarely earns its own launch party, although the company selling a way to do it is entitled to one.
Khoury’s advice to aspiring founders has included “Be honest with yourself.” Applied to his own career, that means remembering the long interval before the market agreed, and the later decisions about which business to pursue. The impressive numbers came with choices about where to spend effort.
For all the changes in vocabulary, the front door remains a useful test. Can a customer find the right place, learn something accurate and get a reply? Khoury has built a career around making that happen at more than one location. Tomorrow, every one of those locations will need attention again.