“Marketing for challenger brands is in crisis.”
So says Duarte Garrido, who has just raised £1m pre-seed funding to try to fix the problem with DOJO AI.
Garrido, who began his career at Reuters as a digital producer, has spent most of his career leading global marketing teams from London – mostly in big brands such as Coca-Cola, Sky and Standard Chartered.
When he pivoted to tech – first at Volt.io then as a consultant for marketing and growth in startups and scaleups – what he saw there was “radically different”.
“CMOs were being sacked after six months on the job, teams were worn out and stressed out – and I was brought in to fix it,” he explains to BusinessCloud.
“As part of my job, I tried to dig deeper into why marketing seemed to only work OK for big brands. What I found was that the tech was to blame.”
Marketing technology has evolved into a “sea of point solutions”, he says. “There are over 15,000 of these today – all disconnected, all overly complex, with their own data and their own dashboards and their own workflows.
“Smaller teams can’t handle it, so they bring in agencies and consultancies. And that’s when they get sacked because the overhead is too high. I knew then that I could build something different.
“A single tool that would bring brand and performance data under the same roof, helping marketers get data, uncover insights, decide strategy, plan campaigns, create content, and predict results.”
He established DOJO AI eight months ago with Antonio Alegria. The startup already has more than 20 clients, primarily in the US and the UK, including PensionBee, Ecologi, Yonder, Broadvoice, Unbabel, Work.Life and Hubstar.
The pre-seed round has mostly been raised from angels – including senior names at Broadvoice, PensionBee, Expedia, Syngenta, Adobe and Klarna – and was led by institutional investor Heartfelt Capital.
So how does the tech work in practice?
“You have what is essentially a full stack marketing agency at your disposal in the form of AI agents cooperating together on a data engine that is a digital twin of your whole marketing operation,” he explains.
“All the questions you need an answer to… all the goals you need to reach… DOJO can do it all.
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“You might ask: ‘Tell me where I’ve wasted money on paid ads and how to fix it’; ‘Help me outrank my competitor in SEO in two weeks’; ‘Create the perfect omnichannel campaign to generate more leads to my website’.
“Next year, it will become a full AI marketing operating system – a complete rethink of marketing from first principles. Forget static workflows, scheduled posts, quarterly market research, automated ad campaigns. This is enterprise marketing capabilities for a team of one.
“Companies of all sizes will finally be able to compete in spite of their budgets.”
Jasper Martens, CMO at listed FinTech PensionBee, offered a testimonial: “DOJO AI is really your marketing assistant on tap.
“It’s been a wonderful help in assessing our positioning against key competitors; helping to define our ideal marketing channel mix and finesse key marketing messages on various campaigns.”
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