For Adelle Wood, a Cambridge, UK-based founder and growth leader, the biggest enemy of effective strategy has always been assumption.
Along with her co-founders, she is building Cambium AI to solve a pervasive problem in the industry: the reliance on fictional customer profiles and inaccessible data.
The Problem: The High Cost of Guesswork
Adelle identifies a critical flaw in modern business: while data exists, it is often locked away from the people who need it most. She argues that for decades, strategy has been built on "fictional customer profiles," simply because vital public data remained locked behind technical barriers.
"In the startup world, time is the most valuable currency," Adelle explains. "The longer a founder or marketer has to wait to validate a target audience, query complex data, or build a robust, evidence-based persona, the more market opportunity they lose."
She describes a scenario where early-stage teams are forced to rely on instincts or high-level assumptions because they lack a full data science team or the budget for expensive enterprise tools.
The Solution: Democratizing Market Intelligence
To close this gap, Cambium AI serves as a bridge between complex datasets and non-technical decision-makers.
The platform allows users to query complex public datasets using plain English, instantly generating comprehensive strategies and synthetic personas grounded in verifiable U.S. public data (such as the Census and ACS).
"We built the tool I always wished I had," says Adelle.
The mission is to empower founders, growth marketers, and researchers to make high-stakes decisions with confidence. "Our goal is to empower every founder and marketer with the data they need, instantly, so they can execute at the breakneck speed that defines success in our industry."
The solution is backed by a complementary founding team comprising Adelle (marketing), a former Chief Data Officer, and an AI Engineer.
A Pivot to the Startup Ecosystem
While Cambium AI initially launched to serve universities and government teams - gaining users from top institutions like The Wharton School, Virginia Tech, and Brown University - a realization changed the company's trajectory.
"The single decision that changed everything for us was realizing our core technology wasn't just for academics - marketers and founders needed it," Adelle reflects.
She noticed a trend of founders building incredible apps quickly - "vibe coding them" - but struggling to launch because their marketing was based on guesswork. "They had the speed to build, but not the bandwidth to do the heavy data validation."
This insight led to a pivot: building an automated marketing planner. This shift connected their core data science capabilities to a founder’s most urgent need: creating a successful marketing plan based on real-world data.
Current Traction
The platform is currently in Beta with over 400 users.
To support the startup community, the marketing tool is currently offered for free within the app, while the research tool operates on a token-based model.
Learn more about Cambium AI:
Website: cambium.ai Socials: LinkedIn | X (Twitter) | YouTube
