// Get To Know The CEO

From Georgia Tech Capstone to Atlanta MarTech Startup: Inside Genius

ATLANTA, September 23 (Hypepotamus) - Marketing teams can see what they spend on Google, LinkedIn and Meta ads. Figuring out what those separate streams of data mean for their next decision is harder.

Atlanta MarTech (marketing technology) startup Genius connects those channels and gives marketers recommendations based on their target customers, benchmarks and goals.

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How Genius analyzes digital ad data

Genius targets companies that are awash in data, but don’t have the time or resources to analyze it all. In its early stages, Genius is focused on the digital advertising space.

Genius connects to marketing channels (be it Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Meta Ads) and then gives marketing teams targeted recommendations. The goal is to take the guesswork out of siloed marketing data streams.

The company grew out of an executive MBA capstone project at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business.

The platform is the brainchild of co-founders Kenneth Burke, Kevin Seveur, Anna Wagner, and Thomas Harris, who were all marketers (or worked directly with marketers) while pursuing their MBAs at Georgia Tech. Based on their own experience, and the interviews they did with hundreds of other marketers, the team started working on the concept of Genius in the classroom.

“We noticed marketers tend to be really strong on the qualitative side of the job (people and creative), but not so much on the quantitative side (data gathering and statistical analysis). Sometimes that's a skills gap, often that's an organizational challenge,” Burke, who serves as the startup’s CEO, said. “Either way, being truly data-driven is tough in practice, especially in marketing. So we started researching the topic to see if there was something in this space that's a consistent problem worth solving that we could solve in a new way.”

The team participated in the Spring cohort of CREATE-X at Georgia Tech this year.

Burke said that the platform is primarily designed for paid media managers and marketing directors, but the Genius team says there is interest coming from marketing agencies, B2B SaaS, and consumer brands.

"Among other things, Genius will be able to help you see and act on where your dollars are being spent across channels, what the impact of that spend is, and how you can improve it — without being trapped in spreadsheets, siloed data, or confusing dashboards," Burke added.

The platform currently has a 14-day free trial.

From Text Request to a Georgia Tech startup

Before moving to Atlanta and co-founding Genius, Burke was in Chattanooga and spent ten years building up Text Request, leading the bootstrapped company’s marketing as it scaled to over $20 million in revenue and ultimately to an acquisition in 2024. He said going through Georgia Tech’s executive MBA program was about helping prepare him to move into the startup founder seat.

“My time at Text Request helped me build the skills it takes to serve people, gain customers, and be creative. Particularly because we were bootstrapped, we often took a different approach to achieving a goal than what was typical "best practice." That creativity and scrappiness ultimately helped us grow better, and also flows directly into what we're building with Genius,” Burke told Hypepotamus. “At Text Request, we had to track every dollar spent and what our return on that spend was. That's really tough to do, especially in marketing where you may not see the impact of an initiative for months or years, and I spent an enormous amount of time and effort tracking all of that down."

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