MAI: Automating performance marketing with AI agents

Performance marketing is the lifeblood of modern commerce. When it works, businesses grow fast. When it doesn’t, it can drain budgets overnight. So it’s critical to get right. Yet running effective marketing campaigns remains one of the most time-consuming, confusing, and stressful parts of building a business.

Marketing teams spend countless hours trying to make sense of opaque ad performance dashboards, attribution sprawl, and market fluctuations. And the problem only exacerbates as companies scale. Today, large enterprises solve this with armies of growth engineers to closely monitor every campaign across every paid channel and adjust spend accordingly in near-real time.

This is where MAI comes in. Yuchen and Jian have created a platform of AI agents purpose-built to put performance marketing on autopilot. MAI creates, monitors, and optimizes campaigns 24/7. It natively integrates with a company’s data, dynamically adjusts spend in real-time, and drives measurable revenue lift — all while guaranteeing a specific ROAS. For early customers, MAI is already managing millions of dollars of ad spend monthly and driving meaningful sales.

At the helm of MAI are Yuchen and Jian. We’ve been consistently impressed by their technical depth, product velocity, and customer centricity. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise: they spent over a decade building ad platforms and e-commerce engines at Google and Instacart, and felt the pain firsthand of effective performance marketing at scale. Their solution is bold but pragmatic, delivering enterprise-level sophistication that delights customers. We like to joke that MAI solves ‘text-to-revenue’ for B2C brands.

Overall, we believe MAI has the opportunity to become a form of insurance that all marketers will use to ensure they get the most out of every campaign, and subsequently leverage their beachhead to capture more of the marketing value chain over time (e.g. asset creation, channel selection, budgeting, SEO, social media, etc). For now, we’re excited to lead MAI’s seed round and to partner with Yuchen and Jian as they build the future of growth marketing.

—Josh