Beyond Instinct: The Operating System for Modern Marketing Teams
Marketing still runs on hunches. We keep adding tools and dashboards, and business websites still convert at ~1.5% – as they did a decade ago. Most stacks are a Rube Goldberg machine: more motion, little movement.
The why for Spike AI is simple: end the guesswork. Human bandwidth can’t parse modern marketing’s combinatorics. We move marketing beyond instinct.
We learned this the hard way. Like many tech companies, we poured millions into famous consultants, advertisements, and elaborate tooling to “fix digital conversion.” The diagnosis was off, so the fix didn’t matter. And we weren’t alone: 80%+ of A/B tests fail – not for lack of execution, but because teams are focused on experiments that won’t move the needle. Ask the wrong question and iteration just gets you to the wrong answer. Meanwhile the machine keeps churning: dashboards, reports, agencies, tools. The industry joke is that 98% of spend is wasted.
AI hasn’t fixed this. Most “agents” copy human workflows. If the workflow underperforms, you just do the wrong thing faster, and celebrate it as speed. The real question is: with all these tools, who decides what to do and when? Who notices SEO signups are flat, shifts the mix from referral to social, rewrites the landing page, reroutes traffic, launches the test, and closes the loop—without a weekly meeting? No one. Because nothing is orchestrating the system. That’s the gap.
We’re building MAGI to close it. MAGI is the intelligence layer and orchestration layer – the operating system for marketing. Not a chatbot. Not a co‑pilot. Not another “AI content generator.” MAGI observes, decides, acts, and learns across web, ads, SEO, email, and creator campaigns. Your tools plug into MAGI for direction; MAGI calls your tools to execute. The old stack was dashboards and to‑do lists. The new stack is coordination, speed, and measurable outcomes.
Think AlphaGo for marketing. AlphaGo didn’t win by clicking faster; it searched deeper and updated its beliefs every move. MAGI does the same across your funnel. It notices CFOs bouncing on pricing, reframes the page, shifts spend, ships the variant, tracks lift, and repeats. No heroics, just learning.
What does this look like in action? One example is a B2B SaaS company that was pouring budget into YouTube and search, but pipeline stayed flat. The team’s fix was “make the blog more persuasive.” MAGI found a stage/persona mismatch. It segmented by source and intent, rewrote ad creative around CFO outcomes, spun a gated 2‑page executive brief, ran LinkedIn campaigns to a website audience built from YouTube traffic, shifted budget from broad TOFU to retargeting + high‑intent search, and routed high‑intent to demo while the rest went to trial. Within ~10 days of audience build they saw qualified leads (CFO/VP at ICPs) up 58%, CPA down 28%, and trial completions up 27%—no tickets, no handoffs.
Most investors ask about competition. Customers don’t. They ask, “can you move the number?” For them, the pain is so immediate that debating the competitive landscape is a luxury. Our investors were the same. They’d understood this pain, felt the urgency, and backed the solution because it worked – not because it fit neatly into a category. We raised a $1.9M pre‑seed led by Sorin Investments, with participation from Principal Venture Partners and GSI. They’re betting on an operating system for marketing.
The best systems make the old process feel slow. If you still need a weekly meeting to pick a headline, you’re missing leverage. The best marketing teams will run on an autonomous operating layer – opinionated about causality, relentless about outcomes, and transparent about why. The future of marketing isn’t more tools. It’s a single intelligent layer that orchestrates them – so your team can focus on story, strategy, and scale.
Humans set direction. MAGI runs the system.
– Deepesh and Shrestha
Full announcement here:
(Here's a pic of Shrestha and me thinking of the solution for the first time in the Scottish Badlands. Yes, really.)
