Gradial just closed a $35 million Series B, bringing its total funding to $55 million—a notable leap for a company that’s betting big on agentic AI as the new operating layer of enterprise marketing. VMG Partners led the round, joined by existing investors Madrona and Pruven Capital.
The interest isn’t surprising. The first wave of AI tools obsessed over content generation. Gradial, by contrast, targeted the often-ignored machinery beneath it: the content supply chain. The approvals, QA cycles, templates, redesigns, migrations, and campaign scaffolding that make enterprise marketing… enterprise marketing.
It’s not as flashy as “AI writes your blog post,” but it’s where brands actually bleed time and money.
The Pitch: Agents That Work Like Digital Employees
Gradial says its AI agents don’t just synthesize copy—they execute workflows. They redesign templates, perform QA, migrate content across enterprise systems, and manage multi-step campaign operations the same way a human team would. The platform lives inside existing tools rather than forcing teams onto new ones.
“Every enterprise marketing team faces the same challenge,” said Doug Tallmadge, Gradial’s CEO and co-founder. “Tools and processes are too fragmented to move at the speed they need. Gradial agents learn the work just like an employee would. This isn’t just another gen AI experiment—it’s a platform transforming the enterprise through real ROI.”
In other words, Gradial isn’t replacing marketers; it’s replacing the drag between their ideas and their execution.
The Problem: Operations, Not Creativity, Are Slowing Down Marketing
Across Fortune 1000 teams—where Gradial already counts many customers—the bottleneck is rarely creative inspiration. It’s operational gravity.
A single marketing request can touch more than ten roles: project managers, developers, designers, authors, copywriters, QA, accessibility specialists. Add enterprise red tape, and what should be a personalized campaign becomes a multi-week relay race.
Gradial’s pitch resonates because it directly attacks that bottleneck. The platform’s agents read context from fragmented systems, reason through multi-step workflows, and execute campaign operations at scale—without breaking brand guidelines or compliance rules.
For marketers, it’s the difference between analyzing performance and constantly playing traffic cop.
T-Mobile’s Results: 80% Faster and 10x More Capacity
T-Mobile’s experience is an early signal of why agentic systems are gaining traction. According to Nick Pappas, Senior Director of Digital Business Management, Gradial is “reducing time to market by 80%+,” unlocking enough capacity for teams to take on “10x more volume of work.”
The time saved isn’t being pocketed as a luxury. It’s being reallocated to more complex, high-impact work—strategic modeling, customer journey innovation, and contextual experiences that can’t be automated.
Why Investors Are Betting on Agentic Operations
According to VMG Partners’ Sam Shapiro, operational drag is the single biggest cost center holding enterprise marketers back. Large brands are burning tens of millions of dollars annually on operational overhead just to deploy content.
Gradial is selling the antidote:
- Automation without sacrificing compliance
- Execution without breaking workflows
- Scale without sacrificing quality
It’s a vision that—if fully realized—reshapes how large organizations execute and personalize messaging, especially as channels multiply and expectations shift toward real-time relevance.
What’s Next: Expanding the Platform and the Team
The company plans to use its Series B funding to accelerate platform development and expand its Seattle-based team across engineering, product, and go-to-market. Expect deeper integrations, more complex workflow automation, and broader adoption among enterprises that want results but don’t want to overhaul their systems to get them.
If the last year has proven anything, it’s that AI will play a central role in marketing. The question is no longer whether content can be generated—it’s whether campaigns can be executed with the speed and precision modern personalization requires.
Gradial’s bet: agentic AI will be the new operating model.
