It started as one guy on Reddit asking whether an IMDb for podcasts existed. Nobody had built it, so Bradley Davis did - and sold it to Acast for up to $34 million.
SelfMade is a New York-based AI creative company behind Skipper, a creative intelligence platform that scrapes customer reviews, Reddit threads, Amazon feedback and social comments to build audience personas and generate on-brand performance ads at scale. Originally founded in 2015 as an Instagram commerce app, the company pivoted through agency work before rebuilding around AI-driven creative production for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands.
Waldo is an agentic brand intelligence platform that compresses the multi-week grind of brand research, competitive analysis, and strategy into minutes. Founded by Justin Wohlstadter, it pairs proprietary data integrations - social platforms, ad libraries, syndicated research - with 50+ structured workflows built for strategists. Agencies and brands give it a brand, a category, and an audience, and AI agents return recurring intelligence briefs on trends, ads, audience conversations, and competitor moves. Backed by a $10M Series A led by Footwork, Waldo already counts agencies like Havas, IPG, and Omnicom and brands like Conair and Kettle & Fire among its users.