Mumbai: Spike AI, the startup building the first autonomous marketing intelligence system, has announced $1.9 million in pre-seed funding led by Sorin Investments, a VC firm co-founded by Sanjay Nayar and Angad Banga, with co-investment from Bay Area-based Principal Venture Partners and strategic participation from investors including GSI.
Founded in 2024 by Deepesh Kumar and Shrestha Pratik, Spike AI replaces fragmented marketing tools and guesswork with a single, self-driving platform. Its flagship MAGI platform operates like an elite growth team—analyzing channels, identifying friction points, and deploying improvements in real-time.
“The trillion-dollar marketing industry doesn’t need more dashboards and tools; it needs intelligent orchestration,” said CEO Deepesh Kumar. “Spike AI delivers a 24/7 AI growth team, shipping measurable outcomes 10x faster.”
Deepesh and Shrestha bring a combined track record of expertise in growth and generative AI. Deepesh previously led growth and experimentation at multiple tech companies, while Shrestha, a generative AI leader, served as team lead at Meta and drove data-led growth at FICO and Swiggy.
“A lot of current AI focuses on speeding up old habits,” said Shrestha Pratik, CTO of Spike AI. “But what if those habits were never ideal? Spike AI’s MAGI is marketing’s AlphaGo: adaptive, explainable, relentless.”
Early customers of Spike AI have reported over 40% increases in conversions, with one early user even offering to acquire the company before joining the funding round.
“Spike AI isn’t just another SaaS tool. It’s the first real attempt at building a ‘marketing brain’ that can replace bloated agency workflows and instinct-driven marketing with measurable, intelligent growth,” said Mandar Dandekar, Partner at Sorin Investments. “We’re excited to back a bold, technically sound team that’s not just building software but reimagining the very foundation of how marketing works in the AI age.”
“What drew us to Spike AI was its first-principles approach to a broken system,” said Dr. Songyee Yoon, Managing Partner of Principal Venture Partners. “They aren’t just adding AI to marketing. They’re building an entirely new paradigm. We believe Spike AI’s technology has the potential to be as fundamental to marketing as Salesforce’s was to CRM.”
With this funding, Spike AI aims to accelerate MAGI’s role as the default operating system for marketing—covering websites, paid media, SEO, email, and influencer marketing—while continuing to expand its customer base globally.
