Waldo — the leading agentic platform for marketing agencies and brand teams. Welcome to boldstart!
At boldstart, we exist to back founders on a mission, and few embody that more than Justin Wohlstadter. Over a decade ago, we partnered with him on Wonder to empower knowledge workers. Today we’re proud to do it again: leading Waldo’s inception round and doubling down in their $10M Series A led by Footwork, alongside our friends at Alt Capital, Sunflower Capital, and The New Normal Fund.
Justin’s new mission is specifically focused on helping brand strategy teams get the full power of AI-native and agentic workflows built specifically for them and their data. It’s a massive market opportunity, with over $200 Billion of annual spend on the agency side alone.
Waldo — a force multiplier for brand strategists and marketers.
It surfaces what matters, and turns signals into strategic moves that marketers, creatives and account managers can make today.
Justin and Jesse Rogers, Waldo’s head of engineering (previously @ Wonder) have combined their domain specific expertise with 50+ prebuilt agentic workflows that instantly automates manual processes that previously took weeks like brand audits, competitive research, trend scans, and audience analysis.
Market leaders like Omnicom, Havas, IPG, LG, Accenture, and Golin are already using Waldo to pitch more business, expand accounts faster, and continuously deliver insights to their clients:
“Waldo’s AI helps ground our marketing decisions in real consumer behavior — social sentiment, competitive moves, and relevant trends. We’re able to move faster, create work that resonates more deeply and drives stronger impact.” — Leah Swalling, Director of Brand Management at Kettle & Fire
They are just getting started, today they are launching the next evolution of Waldo 3.0, which pushes beyond prompts with an agentic platform — that proactively pushes insights and thinks about your brand while you sleep.
⚡ Dashboards that instantly show what’s changed in a brand’s world before a pitch or QBR.
🤖 Agents like the Strategy Agent and Brief Agent — copilots trained to guide teams through research, briefs, and POVs.
đź”” Intelligent alerts that surface audience shifts, competitor moves, or breaking news before a client even asks.
For Justin, Waldo is the continuation of a decade-long mission to empower knowledge workers. At Wonder, he scaled thousands of analysts to deliver on-demand research for the world’s top consulting firms. With the rise of generative AI, he saw the opportunity to take that mission further by codifying workflows, connecting the best data sources, and making it easy for non-strategists to collaborate in ways never before possible.
We’re fired up to back Justin, Jesse, and the entire Waldo team from inception, again. If you’re a strategist (or you rely on one), check out Waldo And if you’re excited about shaping the future of strategy and marketing, they’re hiring.
Welcome to the boldstart family, Waldo! 🚀