GrowthX Raises $12m Series A

Updates
Marcel Santilli
Marcel Santilli·CEO of GrowthX AI
GrowthX Raises $12m Series A

TLDR

  • We raised $12M to fix the "blank cursor problem" where AI tools create more work, not less
  • We scaled to $7M run rate in under a year (profitably) by turning marketing expertise into AI workflows
  • Ramp, Reddit, Webflow, and Superhuman choose us because we deliver real results, not more tools
  • We're building a platform that captures how experts actually work, starting with content and expanding from there

Today, we're announcing our $12M Series A led by Madrona, with Karan Mehandru joining our board.

The Backstory: From 0 → $7M in Under a Year (Profitably)

I didn't set out to start a company. I was just solving my own problems as a CMO.

Marketing leaders are always under pressure. We're usually the first to get blamed (I've been fired 3x and I'm pretty good at my job).

Every company where I led growth — IBM, HP, HashiCorp, Scale AI, ServiceTitan, Deepgram — I faced the same challenge: build an organic growth engine that delivers real business results before the CEO's patience runs out.

At Deepgram, I took a different approach. I spent 1,000+ hours building AI workflows that encoded my expertise in content marketing. Then I hired editors to work within these systems and scaled insanely fast:

  • 3,000 pages in 3 months
  • Daily traffic: 1K → 30K
  • Marketing attributed revenue 4x'd

I knew I had to share this approach. I started running paid workshops, and 170+ participants joined to learn the methodology.

They loved the process and saw its potential, but they all hit the same wall:

"This is exactly what we need... but we don't have the bandwidth to implement it."

That's when it clicked: companies don't need another AI tool collecting dust or a playbook they can't execute. They need a partner powered by AI but guided by experts.

So I quit my CMO role, partnered with Daniel (our CTO), and started helping companies create better content. Workshop attendees became our first clients, and through word of mouth, we grew quickly. By September, we had 12 customers and reached $1M run rate (profitably).

That's when we officially announced GrowthX AI, and demand exploded.

GrowthX-series-a-customers-momentum.jpg

GrowthX-series-a-customers-momentum.jpg

Today, we're serving incredible companies, from startups to publicly traded leaders like: Ramp, Reddit, Webflow, Abnormal Security, Superhuman, Bolt (Stackblitz), Vapi AI, Homebase, Strapi, Galileo AI, Rapyd and several others.

Companies Need Growth, Not More Tools

Why are we growing so fast? Because CMOs don't want more tools their teams won't use or expensive agencies that bait and switch.

They have a mandate to be AI-native while growing faster and more efficiently. We deliver this through a simple process:

  • We research what your audience and competitors care about
  • We create structured content that answers these questions
  • We publish at scale (cutting costs from $1-2 per word to ~$0.10)
  • We optimize based on real engagement data
  • We distribute strategically across channels

This systematic approach is why customers see 300% increases in traffic, 3x content production, and 10x faster publishing.

AI-powered-growth-customers.jpg

AI-powered-growth-customers.jpg

The Future We’re Building: AI That Serves Experts, Not Replaces Them

Most AI tools start with a blank cursor. An empty box. No context. Just a blinking line waiting for you explain the same context one more time.

This is backward. At some point you realize you work for the AI, not the other way around. You're the one endlessly feeding it context, crafting perfect prompts, and fixing its mistakes. And even if you do get it to produce something valuable, good luck getting anyone else to reproduce it. What was supposed to save time actually creates more work.

There's a deeper issue here. The people building AI tools rarely understand the real work they're trying to automate. They're focused on the outputs, not the process. It's like trying to help a chef by looking at the finished dish without ever watching them cook.

We took a completely different path. We started with services instead of software. This isn't because we love services (we don't). It's because services force you to understand what actually works.

Take content creation. It's not just typing words. It's a sequence of expert decisions:

  • Researching with specific intent and audience in mind
  • Structuring information in ways that create clarity
  • Drafting with the right balance of detail and directness
  • Editing not just for grammar, but for impact

Each step involves subtle judgment calls that most AI tools completely miss. But these judgment calls are exactly what determine whether something works or fails.

Our platform captures these expert patterns:

  1. It encodes expert processes - Not just steps, but actual decision-making
  2. It assembles the right tools for each job - Research, retrieval, generation, and more
  3. It keeps humans in control - Expertise at critical moments, not just final review
  4. It runs at scale - The same process working reliably thousands of times
  5. It gets smarter - Every expert decision improves future outputs

This approach gives us 10x productivity gains while preserving what actually matters: expert judgment.

With this funding, we're accelerating our platform vision to tackle more types of services and will soon open it up more broadly.

The future isn't AI replacing experts. It's AI turning your organization's best thinking into repeatable systems.

Share
Related content

Keep reading.

We aim to inspire.



Join us

Get started with AI-Led Growth

Whether you're a budding startup or an established enterprise, discover how our AI can streamline your content creation and fuel your growth.

© 2026 GrowthX. All rights reserved.