WALDO

A strategist at a global agency opens a laptop on a Tuesday morning. There is a pitch on Friday for a brand she has never worked on, an audience she has to understand by lunch, and a competitive landscape that shifted overnight. Six years ago this was a two-week scramble. Now she types a brand, a category, and an audience into Waldo - and the brief is waiting before her coffee cools.

That, in one sentence, is what Waldo does. It is an agentic brand intelligence platform: give it something like "Mastercard x travel services x Gen-Z," and a fleet of AI agents goes to work across social platforms, ad libraries, syndicated research, and live trends. What comes back is not a pile of links. It is a recurring intelligence brief - what's happening, who's talking, what competitors just did, and what it might mean.

Strategy still ran on slide decks and guesswork

Marketing has a dirty secret. The industry that sells precision to everyone else still does its own homework by hand. Agencies bill against roughly $200 billion a year, and a startling share of that goes into the unglamorous middle of the funnel: research, audience mapping, trend hunting, competitive teardowns, translating all of it into a creative brief. Smart people, doing slow work, in tools never built for the speed of the feed.

The feed, meanwhile, does not wait. By the time a deck is polished, the trend it described has aged. Waldo exists because the gap between "what's true about a brand right now" and "what's in the brief" had grown too wide to ignore.

A decade-long mission, handed to agents

Justin Wohlstadter has done this before - the human way. At Wonder (AskWonder), he scaled thousands of analysts delivering on-demand research for firms like McKinsey. Before that he led product design at Divide, which Google acquired, and co-founded Boldstart Ventures, with a Harvard and Oxford education in the rearview. He has spent a career on a single question: how do you give a non-expert the powers of an expert, fast?

Generative AI gave him a new answer. With Jesse Rogers - Head of Engineering and a Wonder alum - leading the build, the bet was simple and unfashionable: don't replace the strategist, codify them. Take the judgment calls strategists live by, turn them into 50-plus structured workflows, wire in the best data sources, and let agents run the parts that were never the point.

Weeks, meet minutes

The argument Waldo makes is fundamentally about time. Here is the claim it lives or dies on - the same brand research cycle, before and after the agents show up. (Directional, but it's the whole point.)

The skeptics signed first

Here is the part that's hard to fake. The customers Waldo points to are not scrappy DTC experiments - they are the agencies that invented the slow process Waldo is trying to delete, plus the brands that pay them. When the people whose job you're automating become your customers, that's a kind of proof.

Backing the customers is a venture roster that reads like a checklist of people who watch this market closely: Footwork leading the Series A, Boldstart Ventures doubling down on a bet it made early, with Alt Capital, Sunflower Capital, and The New Normal Fund alongside.

Give the non-expert an expert's reach

Strip away the agents and the dashboards and Waldo is chasing the same thing Wohlstadter chased at Wonder: make it easy for non-strategists to collaborate in ways that weren't possible before. The point was never to fire the strategist. It was to hand everyone in the room the research firepower that used to belong to a specialized few - and to free the specialists to do the thinking only humans do.

There's a quiet irony in the name. "Where's Waldo?" is a game about searching a crowded page for one small figure who's deliberately hard to find. Waldo the company flips it: the insight is the thing hiding in the crowd, and the product's whole job is to put its finger on it before you knew to look.

The brief that writes itself

Every brand now lives in a feed that updates faster than any team can read it. The winners won't be the ones with the most analysts; they'll be the ones who notice first. An always-on engine that watches your brand, your category, and your audience while you sleep stops being a luxury and starts being table stakes. That's the world Waldo is building toward - and the reason a 27-person company in New Orleans has Omnicom on speed dial.

So back to that strategist, Friday's pitch looming. She doesn't open a blank deck and brace for a two-week sprint anymore. She opens Waldo, reads what already found her, and spends her morning on the part that was always the point - the idea. The crowd is still loud. The figure is still small. But now something is doing the looking for her.