Hey, it's Marcel Santilli, CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI.
I have a special announcement. We don't normally use our newsletter for this, but today we're making an exception.
We're announcing a strategic investment from HubSpot Ventures.
A little over a year ago, when I started building this company, I couldn't have imagined that HubSpot would want to partner with us like this. I've admired them for most of my career.
They built a $30B company on one belief: content drives growth.
I built my entire career on that same belief.
👋 Hey, asking for a small favor
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Before GrowthX, I spent 15 years as a marketer. I led growth at Deepgram, Scale AI, ServiceTitan, HashiCorp. Companies that went from early stage to billions in valuation. And in every one of them, the thing that worked was the same. Create the best content for your buyers. They find you.
But I also lived the pain. I hired agencies that didn't understand our business. I bought tools that created more work than they saved. I watched my teams drown in execution while strategy collected dust. I kept asking myself why nobody had built the thing that marketers actually needed.
That's why I started GrowthX.
The world didn't need another agency. It didn't need another tool. It needed something that works. A system where AI handles the heavy lifting and humans do the work that matters. Where every piece of content makes the next one smarter. Where the outcome is the product, not the software.
We call it service-as-software.
In the past year, over 70 companies trusted us with their growth.
Vercel, Lovable, Ramp, Webflow, Navan, Udemy, SentinelOne. Every one of them came to us with some version of the same ask: help us grow faster, do more with less, and stop drowning.
And now AI is rewriting how buyers discover and choose vendors. 94% of B2B buyers use LLMs during their buying process. ChatGPT is the #1 source influencing vendor shortlists.
The game changed. The principle didn't.
Create the best content. Keep it the best. For your buyers and for AI engines. They keep finding you.
Having HubSpot Ventures as a partner means something to me that's hard to put into words. The company that proved content drives growth looked at what we're building and said: this is what comes next. I sat with that for a while. It still hasn't fully sunk in.
I'll be honest. There are a lot of hard moments in the past year. Where the leap from CMO to founder felt bigger than I'd prepared for. Where I wondered if the market was ready for what we were building. Those moments still come. They probably always will.
But then I look at what this team has done. Nearly 100 people who show up every day to solve one of the hardest problems in marketing: how do you get discovered, shortlisted, and chosen when everything about how buyers behave is changing?
We don't have all the answers. We have the belief, the customers, the team, and now the right partners. That's enough to keep building.
This is my life's work. We're just getting started.
Marcel
P.S. If any of this resonates and you want to explore what AI-led growth could look like for your brand, I'd love to help personally. Book a strategy session, and we'll map out how to grow your organic visibility, show up in AI search, and get in front of the right buyers faster.
