Sorin Investments leads $1.9M pre-seed round in Spike AI

Startup Spike AI has announced $1.9 million in pre-seed funding led by Sorin Investments, a VC firm co-founded by Sanjay Nayar and Angad Banga, with co-investment from Bay Area-based Principal Venture Partners and strategic participation from investors including GSI.    

Founded in 2024 by Deepesh Kumar and Shrestha Pratik, Spike AI replaces fragmented marketing tools and guesswork with a single, self-driving platform. Spike’s MAGI platform operates like an elite growth team analyzing channels, identifying friction, and deploying improvements in real-time.

“The trillion-dollar marketing industry doesn’t need more dashboards and tools; it needs intelligent orchestration,” said CEO Deepesh Kumar. “Spike AI delivers a 24/7 AI growth team, shipping measurable outcomes 10x faster.”

“A lot of current AI focuses on speeding up old habits,” said Shrestha Pratik, CTO of Spike AI. “But what if those habits were never ideal? Spike AI’s MAGI is marketing’s AlphaGo: adaptive, explainable, relentless.”

“Spike AI isn’t just another SaaS tool. It’s the first real attempt at building a ‘marketing brain’ that can replace bloated agency workflows and instinct-driven marketing with measurable, intelligent growth,” said Mandar Dandekar, Partner at Sorin Investments. “We’re excited to back a bold, technically sound team that’s not just building software but reimagining the very foundation of how marketing works in the AI age.”

"What drew us to Spike AI was its first-principles approach to a broken system," said Dr. Songyee Yoon, Managing Partner of Principal Venture Partners. "They aren’t just adding AI to marketing. They’re building an entirely new paradigm. We believe Spike AI’s technology has the potential to be as fundamental to marketing as Salesforce’s was to CRM.”

This funding accelerates MAGI’s default operation system approach across websites, paid media, SEO, email, and influencer marketing, stated a press release form the company.