agentic-marketing
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Alexi Hatch Is Racing the Half-Life of Customer Intent
The design-trained CMO of Acoustic has built a career around one stubborn idea: marketing gets better when evidence travels faster than opinion.
Deepak Bahree Is Teaching Marketing to Think in Locations
The Birdeye CMO has spent two decades turning technical systems into growth systems. His latest argument is simple: AI matters only when it can do useful work for every location.
Claire Darling Is Rewriting Marketing’s Job Description
After three decades of turning enterprise software into stories buyers can act on, Uniphore’s five-time CMO is making a sharper wager: the next marketing department will behave less like a campaign calendar and more like a living operating system.
Melanie Nelson Put an AI Rep on the Night Shift - Then the Numbers Woke Up
The Rightsline CMO has spent a career making invisible infrastructure legible. Her latest move gave an AI sales agent the unanswered website traffic - and gave the board numbers it could understand.
Maura Rivera Taught the Website to Answer Back - Then Taught Marketing to Hire AI
At Qualified, Maura Rivera turned product launches into an operating rhythm, built a team that stayed, and helped move B2B marketing from forms and follow-up to coached AI agents. Then the company returned to where her career began: Salesforce.
Kashish Gupta Kept Killing Good Ideas Until Hightouch Found Its Job
A travel bot died, four ideas vanished in three months, and a warehouse plumbing problem became a marketing company. Kashish Gupta’s useful obsession is not being right first - it is learning fast enough to earn the next move.
Tejas Manohar
Tejas Manohar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Hightouch, the San Francisco company that helped create the Composable CDP category by bringing customer data platform capabilities directly onto the data warehouse. He moved to San Francisco at 16 to become one of Segment's first ten engineers, then left in 2018 to start Hightouch with Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Under his leadership Hightouch has crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.75B valuation, pivoting the company toward AI Decisioning and agentic marketing.
Doug Tallmadge
Doug Tallmadge is the co-founder and CEO of Gradial, a Seattle enterprise-AI company building agentic tools that automate the unglamorous middle of marketing - the approvals, tagging, compliance checks, and publishing that sit between a finished idea and a live campaign. Before Gradial, he spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a software engineering manager, where he helped scale the Starlink network from zero to more than 500,000 customers. A Dartmouth physics graduate who also passed through Lockheed Martin and Bridgewater Associates, he started Gradial in 2023 with three Dartmouth classmates and has since raised roughly $53M across seed, Series A, and a $35M Series B led by VMG Partners.
Jason Davis
Jason Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Simon AI (formerly Simon Data), a New York customer data platform that rebranded around agentic AI in 2025. A machine-learning PhD who built search algorithms at Google, he founded the ad-tech startup Adtuitive, sold it to Etsy in 2009, then ran Etsy's search and data teams as the marketplace grew from $180M to a $1B+ run rate. He and grad-school friend Matt Walker started Simon to give marketers direct, governed access to the data trapped inside their own warehouses. The company has raised roughly $117.8M, including a $54M Series D led by Macquarie Group.
Misbah Uraizee
Misbah Uraizee is the co-founder and CEO of Nectar Social, the Palo Alto agentic operating system that runs brand conversations in DMs, comments and group chats at machine scale. A Yale biotech grad who spent a decade building product at Microsoft, Meta and Twitter - leading News Feed and creator monetization for billions of users - she left Meta in 2023 with her sister Farah to build Nectar. The company exited stealth in 2025 and raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures' Anthropic-backed Anthology Fund in May 2026, powering more than 10 million conversations a week for brands like e.l.f. Beauty, Figma and Liquid Death.
Alex Sherman
Alex Sherman is the CEO and co-founder of Bluefish, a New York-based platform that measures and shapes how brands appear in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Amazon's Rufus. A European history major who became one of MediaMath's earliest employees in 2008, he co-founded the retail-media platform PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft in 2019) before launching Bluefish in 2024 to rebuild the marketing stack for the AI internet. In April 2026 Bluefish closed a $43M Series B co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA, bringing total funding to roughly $68M, with around 10% of the Fortune 500 already on the platform.
Kraig Swensrud
Kraig Swensrud is the co-founder and CEO of Qualified, the AI-powered pipeline generation platform built natively on Salesforce. A serial entrepreneur and former Salesforce CMO, he has founded three companies - Kieden (acquired by Salesforce in 2006), GetFeedback (acquired by Campaign Monitor in 2014, later by SurveyMonkey), and Qualified (acquired by Salesforce in April 2026 for an estimated multi-hundred million valuation). At Qualified, he built the category of conversational marketing and agentic AI for B2B enterprises, raising $163M in funding and growing to ~260 employees before the acquisition completed a full-circle return to Salesforce.
Naveen Gupta
Naveen Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Birdeye, a Palo Alto-based AI-powered customer experience platform that serves over 100,000 businesses globally. Inspired by a personal struggle to find a quality surgeon for his mother at Stanford, Naveen and his brother Neeraj built Birdeye in 2012 to help businesses manage their online reputation and grow through customer feedback. Under his leadership, Birdeye crossed $100M ARR in 2023, raised over $93M in total funding, and pioneered what Naveen calls 'Experience Marketing' - the discipline of turning customer satisfaction into organic growth. A veteran of Yahoo and RingCentral, he brings deep product and operational expertise to one of SaaS's quietest success stories.
Chris O'Neill
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.