A New Kind of Growth Company is Emerging: Meet Enso
A startup called enso is turning “growth hacking” into something closer to applied research, running fleets of AI agents against the world’s biggest platforms and publishing what they find, rather than simply selling a marketing tool.
As reported by The Next Web, the company operates less like a SaaS vendor and more like a lab: it forms a hypothesis about how a platform ranks or surfaces content, tests it with a control group, measures the outcome, and documents the result even when the experiment fails. The work spans five areas, including search and AI-answer-engine visibility, condition-based outbound outreach across email and messaging, participation in community forums, newsletters, and social platforms. The company’s founder has coined a name for the approach: agentic growth hacking.
enso’s own path has already taken a sharp turn. It began as an AI agent marketplace, raising a $6 million seed round backed by NFX, before pivoting entirely into growth research and raising $25 million for the new direction. Rather than hide the pivot, the company put it on its own About page.
The shift mirrors a broader idea now circulating in venture circles, sometimes described as “service as a software”: instead of selling a login and a dashboard, companies sell the finished outcome, produced largely by AI rather than by a team of people. Where traditional software vendors demonstrate features, companies built around this model have to show results, complete with sample sizes and the tests that didn’t work.
That distinction matters because the market around enso is shifting quickly. Cold outbound tools built two or three years ago are running into diminishing returns as reply rates fall and pricing climbs, while traditional marketing agencies are cutting staff even as overall ad spending rises, a sign that clients are unbundling retainers rather than cancelling them outright. At the same time, paid search costs have jumped sharply this year and AI-generated answer summaries are reducing clicks on informational searches, squeezing both major channels marketers have relied on for the past two decades.
Whether a research-driven model like enso’s can scale beyond its founder’s judgment, and whether platforms will tolerate agents probing for weaknesses at scale, remains an open question. But the company’s early growth and its willingness to publish its methods have made it one of the names marketers are watching this season.