A new Seattle startup is betting that artificial intelligence can take marketing off the plate of small business owners.
Omada.ai, founded earlier this year by longtime tech entrepreneur Pete Christothoulou, officially launched Tuesday with what it describes as an “AI marketing team” designed to handle the day-to-day digital marketing tasks for small and midsize business owners.
Backed by Crosslink Capital, HubSpot Ventures, and Seattle-based firm Ascend, the startup says its platform can plan, create, and optimize marketing campaigns automatically for less than $9 per day.
Instead of developing a single marketing “copilot” or dashboard, Omada’s approach is a set of coordinated AI agents — a marketing assistant, social media manager, designer, video producer, and more — that collaborate like a virtual team. Users interact through a simple chat interface, and the system handles tasks such as posting content, running ads, responding to customers, and tracking performance.
“Their agent-based architecture delivers a truly autonomous and proactive system that gives small business owners the access to capabilities and marketing expertise they’ve never had access to before,” Adam Coccari, managing director at HubSpot Ventures, said in a statement.
Omada’s pitch is that it acts less like another app and more like a full-service team — a “do-it-for-me” model rather than “do-it-yourself.” Its agents are built on proprietary infrastructure that coordinates specialized AI models for language, vision, and audio tasks. The company says the system learns each business’s tone and goals over time, continuously optimizing campaigns.
Omada enters an increasingly competitive space. A growing number of startups use generative AI to help businesses create content and automate tasks — including Seattle-area companies Gradial, Adora, and Forum3. Larger companies such as HubSpot, Canva, and Adobe have also embedded AI marketing tools into their small business offerings.
Christothoulou co-founded Omada with Siva Muthukumarasamy, a longtime engineering leader who was CTO at Peel Technologies, as well as Andrew Miller, a veteran marketing exec who worked at Xembly as head of user acquisition.
Omada marks Christothoulou’s latest foray into applying automation and data intelligence to the marketing world. He previously co-founded and ran Marchex, a Seattle-based advertising analytics company that went public in 2004 and helped pioneer digital call tracking for marketers.
Christothoulou served as CEO at Marchex until 2016 and later launched Xembly, a Seattle startup that developed an “AI chief of staff” to automate productivity tasks. The company shut down its consumer service last year.
