enso founder portrait Credit: enos Growth hacking was supposed to be dead. The term had a good run. Sean Ellis coined it in 2010, and for a decade it described the scrappy, slightly unholy tricks that built the consumer internet: Airbnb piggybacking on Craigslist, Dropbox handing out free storage for referrals, Hotmail signing every outgoing email with an ad for itself. Then the platforms wised up, the loopholes closed, and “growth hacker” became a job title that’s almost gone.
Now it’s back, and it looks nothing like before. Today, it looks like a research lab: a fleet of AI agents running controlled experiments on the world’s biggest distribution platforms around the clock, publishing the results, and moving on before the platform notices. The company behind this lab is called enso. And if you spend any time in B2B marketing circles this autumn, you will hear its name.
A Research Lab for growth hacking The first thing to understand about enso is what it isn’t. It isn’t a SaaS company with a dashboard and a sign up page. That distinction shapes everything. A vendor sells a tool and hopes you get results.
A lab forms a hypothesis about how a platform decides what gets seen, tests it with a control group, measures what happened, and writes it up, including when the answer was “nothing.” enso does this for customers, on their behalf, inside the platforms where their buyers spend the day at an extreme scale, and then it publishes the findings for everyone. Every major platform is drawn as a fortress with walls, and every fortress, the site insists, has a crack. The lab’s job is to find it, walk your brand through it, and document how. The work is organized into five research programs: search and AI answer-engine visibility, outbound sequences that run across email, messaging, SMS and voice on conditions rather than a fixed cadence, community participation in the forums where buyers ask each other for advice, newsletters, and social.
The lab calls the discipline agentic growth hacking. Its founder coined the term and is writing the book. The lab’s own history has a plot twist. It started as an AI agent marketplace and raised a $6 million seed round led by NFX.
Then it pivoted, hard, into growth research, and raised $25 million. Pivots usually get buried. enso put this one on the About page, which tells you something about how it operates. Service as a software Sequoia Capital posted a blog about this new notion. Software, the firm argued, was about to stop selling tools and start selling the work itself.
For two decades the industry sold seats: a login, a dashboard, and the promise that your people would get more done. The next act sells outcomes: the lead, the citation, the meeting, delivered by software that does the labor rather than assisting a human who does it. Service as a software. A market measured not in the $650 billion the world spends on software, but in the trillions it spends on services.
Most companies claiming that shift are still selling seats with an agent bolted on. enso is one of the few actually built on the other side of it. It doesn’t sell a growth tool. It sells growth, produced by agents, and it publishes the receipts. That last part is the tell.
When you sell software, you demo features. When you sell outcomes, you have to show results, and enso shows them with sample sizes, controls, and the experiments that failed, so the entire category can learn from it. The category enso is walking into To see why a lab could be worth billions of dollars, you have to look at the market it sits in, because agentic GTM in 2026 is a market eating itself, and it’s eating the agencies too. Two years ago the pitch was simple: an “AI SDR” that writes cold emails, and a data tool to feed it.
Dozens of companies raised on that. Then the arithmetic caught up. Everyone’s agent was writing to the same inboxes, reply rates fell, and the enterprise version of the product now starts at roughly $45,000 a year before you find out whether it works for your buyers. An analysis of 249 Y Combinator GTM startups founded since 2023 found only 2 percent still pitch full SDR replacement.
The rest quietly rebranded as copilots. The old alternative to the tools was an agency, and agencies are having a worse year than the tools. Worldwide ad spending grew 8.6 percent in 2025; holding-company revenues fell 1.2 percent. Read that again.
The market for marketing grew by nearly nine percent, and the companies built to serve it shrank. The big holding companies have cut thousands of roles in eighteen months, one post-merger group went from roughly 128,000 staff to about 105,000 in a year, and Forrester, after an average 8 percent headcount cut across agencies in 2025, forecasts another 15 percent of agency jobs gone in 2026. Sixty percent of US marketing leaders say they are spending less on agencies specifically because of AI, and 82 percent of major brands now run an in-house shop. The mechanics are simple and brutal.
Customers use the same AI tools the agencies use. A marketing manager who used to send a brief opens a tab, gets a usable draft in a minute, edits it and ships it. The retainer doesn’t get cancelled; it gets unbundled one line item at a time, and by renewal the decision is already made. Retainers are giving way to project work, project work has thinner margins, and the junior execution layer that used to justify the fee is being replaced by software.
Forrester’s own phrase for where agencies end up is “marketing purveyors“: sellers of products, technology and media rather than hours. A few AI-native shops are reportedly running at 50 to 80 percent margins against the traditional 15 to 20, precisely because they never had that execution layer to lose. So the two things a company used to buy, a tool or an agency, are both breaking in the same direction. The tool can’t prove it works.
The agency can’t justify its hours. What’s left is whoever can show the outcome. Meanwhile the platforms did what platforms do. The biggest data layer in the space raised at a $3.1 billion valuation, and the incumbents started shopping.
In the space of four months this year, one sales-data company bought a signals startup, one CRM giant bought a website-visitor startup, and a video-conferencing giant announced it was buying a community-intelligence company. The independent signal-and-outbound layer is down to a single major player. And the way this all gets paid for is changing under everyone’s feet. In April, the largest mid-market CRM switched its prospecting agent to $1 per qualified lead and its service agent to 50 cents per resolved conversation, with a 28-day trial.
Its enterprise rival bills $2 per conversation. Outcome-based pricing is now the default direction, and once you’re paying for outcomes, the only vendors worth paying are the ones who can prove they produce them. That is the gap enso walked into: not a tool, not an agency, but a lab that sells the outcome and publishes the proof. That is the door enso walked through.
Every trend in the category points the same way: the inbox is saturated, the tools are consolidating into CRMs, and buyers are demanding proof before payment. A lab that operates everywhere except the inbox, sells methods rather than seats, and publishes its evidence is not competing with the AI SDRs. It’s what comes after them. Two things are dying at once Marketing leaders in 2026 are rebuilding go-to-market from a blank page, and the reason is that the two engines that powered B2B growth for twenty years are failing in the same quarter.
The first is paid media. Ads work when the top of the funnel is uncrowded, and it has never been more crowded. Anyone can now vibe-code a product in a weekend, which means the product is no longer the moat; the marketing is, and everyone knows it, so everyone bids. Cross-industry cost per click rose 12 percent this year, the steepest jump since 2021.
