Most small business owners don’t have a marketing team or a budget for one. What they do have is a phone.
Om Patel and Rahul Mehta are betting that’s enough. Their Atlanta-based startup, Osmoti, lets owners talk to an AI agent named OSMO the way they’d talk to an employee: “launch an ad for our new promo, post this video on all of our socials, follow up with the lead who called last night.” OSMO does the work around the clock and reports back instantly.
While studying finance at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, Patel helped start his family’s cargo trailer dealership, where he took charge of digital advertising.
The results disappointed him. The business was losing thousands of dollars on ad spend every single month.
“I remember staring at those dashboards thinking, there has to be a better way to do this,” Patel said. “We’re a small business. We don’t have a marketing team sitting around optimizing campaigns all day. So that’s when I started asking whether AI could fill that gap.”
That question became Osmoti, what the founders call a fully autonomous marketing department.
From a Hunch to a Prototype
Patel began prototyping the idea in October 2025. He joined CREATE-X, Georgia Tech’s entrepreneurship initiative, as part of the 2026 Startup Launch cohort and set up shop with Osmoti at the Biltmore Innovation Center in Tech Square.
The first version of Osmoti worked like a diagnostic tool. Businesses plugged in their ad accounts, and the software told them what had gone wrong and how to fix their setups.
“Think of it as a copilot for your ads,” Patel said. “It sat alongside you and said, here’s what’s broken, here’s what to change.”
The Builder
Mehta, while studying data science at Georgia Tech, had already built AI that real companies relied on. As a first-year intern at Southwire, he built an AI analytics platform from scratch to replace Tableau for the company’s marketing division, letting executives ask questions in plain English and get answers from their own data. It cut analysis time by about 95%. At Manhattan Associates, he built the testing loop the company’s AI agents go through before they reach customers, checking everything from the instructions that drive them to the answers they give. It caught hundreds of defects and became part of how Manhattan’s agent teams evaluate, test and release their agents. He was also a founding systems engineer at Keep Safe, a smart-hotel startup, and helped close its first hotel partnership.
On almost every team, he was the only engineer in the room.
“I was always the technical guy on a team full of business-oriented people,” Mehta said. “I learned a lot, but after a while it got tiring building someone else’s vision. I wanted something that was mine.”
A Chance Meeting
Patel and Mehta first crossed paths at a CREATE-X event. Mehta mentioned he’d built something similar to Osmoti at Southwire, and the two traded numbers.
A few weeks later, both showed up, unplanned, at a Y Combinator event at Georgia Tech. When it ended, the room rushed for free sweatshirts. Patel grabbed one, looked up and saw Mehta at the far door, about to leave.
“I’m hitting a full sprint across the hall just trying to get his attention,” Patel said. “I think he was a little caught off guard.”
Patel asked him to get coffee. The idea came up, but what stuck was everything else.
“We realized we had a lot of similar morals and values, the things we wanted in life in general,” Patel said. “So we decided, why not. Let’s just try it.”
That was February 2026. They’ve been building Osmoti full time ever since, side by side, 12 hours a day.
From Diagnosing Ads to Doing the Work
As the founders talked with more business owners, they realized a diagnostic tool only solved part of the problem. Owners didn’t just need advice. They needed someone to do the work.
“There’s more than one way to grow a company,” Mehta said. “Most small businesses can’t hire a full marketing team, but they still need everything a marketing team does. So we asked, what if an agent just did it?”
Today, Osmoti works like an AI marketing team on autopilot for small businesses. It creates and runs ad campaigns on Meta, Google and LinkedIn. It makes videos, images and carousels for TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms, and turns customer reviews into posts. It helps businesses show up in both Google search and AI tools like ChatGPT. Its AI agents also follow up with new leads, working from what OSMO learns about the business online plus anything the owner tells it. Owners can manage everything in the web app or just by texting OSMO in iMessage. An iOS and Android app is also in development.
The company focuses on small and midsize businesses, where a steady stream of customers can make or break the month.
One of its first customers, Dynamic 3 Medical Spa in Buckhead, spent $360 on ads in its first 14 days on Osmoti and booked 13 new appointments worth about $6,500, roughly 18 times what it spent.
Building With CREATE-X
Both founders credit CREATE-X with helping them sharpen the business. The program connected them with mentors, resources and a network of fellow founders working through the same challenges.
“The connections alone were huge,” Patel said. “Our mentors really pushed us on go-to-market. They helped us figure out who we should sell to first and how to reach them.”
Staying Rooted in Atlanta
Osmoti now works with more than 20 businesses, and the founders plan to scale. For now, though, they’re focused on delivering for that early group.
“Our first customers took a chance on us, and we want them to thrive,” Mehta said. “If we get it right for them, the growth takes care of itself.”