A career spent selling software, now aimed at governing it
Manlio Carrelli runs Stensul, the New York marketing creation platform that lets big enterprise teams build email and landing page campaigns without letting the brand or the compliance team down. He stepped into the CEO seat in May 2026, taking over from founder Noah Dinkin after more than a decade of founder-led growth. His arrival is a signal: Stensul is done being a scrappy startup and is now playing for scale.
He came to it from CB Insights, the AI predictive intelligence company, where he was CEO and where, in 2025, he launched what the company billed as the industry's first AI agent workforce - a team of specialized software agents built for M&A, competitive intelligence, deal sourcing and go-to-market. That experience left him with a specific read on where AI actually creates value, and where it creates risk.
The risk is the part that pulled him to Stensul. As generative tools push the volume and velocity of enterprise content up and to the right, marketing teams are being asked to produce more, faster, and never make a mistake. Carrelli's argument is that you can't solve that with willpower. You solve it with systems - guardrails, approvals, reusable content and governance built into the workflow instead of bolted on after.
Stensul is in the right place at exactly the right time. As AI proliferates content creation across the enterprise, governance and compliance are no longer optional.— Manlio Carrelli, on joining Stensul
Speed with guardrails
Carrelli's view of AI is unusually practical for someone whose last job was running an AI company. He doesn't pitch the technology as magic. He pitches it as leverage on top of work people already do - and he's skeptical of tools that try to do everything.
Governance is the feature
More content means more ways to go off-brand and off-compliance. Carrelli treats guardrails as the thing that lets teams go fast, not the thing that slows them down.
Specialists beat generalists
His CB Insights bet was on purpose-built agents with real business context - not do-everything assistants. The same instinct shapes how he thinks about enterprise AI.
Data quality decides output
"The quality of AI output depends entirely on the quality of data input." A blunt reminder that clever models don't fix messy inputs.
Meet workflows where they are
His stated goal isn't to change how enterprises work, but to make their existing workflows dramatically more intelligent - in the tools they already live in.
Founder, CMO, revenue chief, CEO
Carrelli has worn nearly every senior hat in enterprise software. He started building marketing concepts at Managed Objects, ran his own consultancy advising Fortune 500 leaders, founded a string of early-stage companies, then moved into public-company revenue leadership and the CEO seat. The through-line is go-to-market: how software companies grow.
A few things that stand out
An English major in a software world
His degree from the University of Maryland is in English - a humanities grounding for a career built on selling and shaping technology products.
Serial founder
Before the public-company roles, he launched and led multiple startups. He's sat on both sides of the table: the operator raising money and the executive scaling it.
Present at the creation
His early marketing work at Managed Objects helped shape the concepts behind Business Service Management.
Board work beyond the day job
He serves on the board of directors of Counterpart International, extending his reach past pure software leadership.