The marketing landscape is evolving rapidly, with brands facing increasing pressure to create meaningful connections while adapting to new technologies. For Carolina Monestel, Founder & CEO of Carazo Creative, the future of marketing lies in bringing creativity, strategy, and technology together rather than treating them as separate disciplines.
Founded in 2021, Carazo Creative was built around the belief that brands should not have to choose between creative excellence and measurable growth. Through the development of Cora, the company’s proprietary AI infrastructure, Monestel is exploring how artificial intelligence can make marketing smarter and more efficient while preserving the human judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking that drive impactful brands.
Tell us about your founder journey.
Carolina Monestel: I founded Carazo Creative in 2021 with the belief that brands shouldn’t have to choose between strong creative, smart strategy, and measurable growth. I had worked across beauty, fashion, luxury, and consumer brands and kept seeing the same problem: creative, marketing, technology, and performance were often treated as separate functions when they were all influencing the same customer.
I built Carazo Creative to bring those pieces together. What started as an independent agency has grown into a model where brand, creative, growth, and technology operate as one system.
As the company grew, I became increasingly interested in how AI could make that system smarter without removing the human judgment that makes great marketing work. That led me to build Cora, our proprietary AI infrastructure, and to explore the subject further through my writing, including my book *Smart Girls Use AI*.
My founder journey has really been about building the kind of company I believed should exist, then continuing to rethink what an agency can be as technology changes the industry.
What does your company do?
Carolina Monestel: Carazo Creative is an independent creative and digital marketing agency where brand, creative, growth, and technology work as one system. We work across branding, creative, paid media, SEO, ecommerce, web, and digital growth, giving clients one team that can both develop the strategy and execute it.
Our work is supported by Cora, our proprietary AI infrastructure, which helps connect performance data, research, opportunities, and the work happening across client accounts.
What problem do you solve?
Carolina Monestel: Marketing has become increasingly fragmented. A company may have one team handling its brand, another managing paid media, someone else responsible for SEO, an ecommerce partner, a web developer, and multiple software platforms generating more data than anyone has time to interpret.
We solve that fragmentation. Carazo Creative brings those disciplines together so strategy, creative decisions, execution, and performance data inform one another instead of operating in silos. The goal is not simply to give clients more marketing activity. It is to give them a clearer, more connected system for growth.
What makes your approach unique?
Carolina Monestel: We combine the flexibility and creative thinking of an independent agency with technology we have built around the way we actually work.
Cora, our proprietary AI infrastructure, gives us a way to connect information across accounts and surface insights and opportunities more continuously. But we are equally intentional about what we do not automate. Brand judgment, creative direction, positioning, relationships, and major strategic decisions still require human context and accountability.
That balance is central to our approach. We use AI to make talented people better informed and more effective, not to remove them from the process.
What is your next big step for your company?
Carolina Monestel: The next big step for Carazo Creative is scaling the technology side of the company. We recently released Cora as an application, taking technology we originally built to make our own agency more efficient and turning it into a much larger part of the business.
Cora brings together the data, insights, research, opportunities, and activity happening across marketing into one place. For our team, that means spending less time pulling information from different platforms, building reports, and manually identifying what needs attention, and more time actually acting on it.
Now, our focus is on continuing to develop Cora as a SaaS product, expanding its capabilities, and building the technology side of Carazo Creative alongside the agency. We see the future of the company as more than an agency that uses AI. We’re building proprietary technology around what we’ve learned from actually doing the work, with the goal of creating a smarter and more scalable model for how modern marketing gets done.
What are you most excited about right now?
Carolina Monestel: I’m most excited about seeing Cora become a real product beyond the internal technology we originally built for our agency. We recently released the application, and watching something that started as a solution to our own operational challenges evolve into a SaaS platform has been incredibly exciting.
We built Cora because marketing teams spend an enormous amount of time moving between platforms, pulling data, creating reports, and trying to figure out what actually deserves attention. Now we’re seeing how much of that friction technology can remove.
For me, the exciting part isn’t AI for the sake of AI. It’s building something that gives people back time to think, create, make decisions, and do the work that actually requires them.
What advice would you give to other founders?
Carolina Monestel: Build around a real problem, preferably one you understand firsthand. Cora exists because we experienced the problem ourselves before we ever thought about turning the solution into a product.
I’d also tell founders not to wait until everything feels perfectly figured out. Some of the best decisions I’ve made came from starting with what I knew, paying close attention to what wasn’t working, and being willing to change the model as the business grew.
And don’t confuse doing everything yourself with being a good founder. Your job eventually becomes building the systems, technology, and team that allow the company to grow beyond what you personally have the capacity to do.
Where’s the best place to connect with you?
Carolina Monestel: The best place to connect with me is LinkedIn. You can also learn more about Carazo Creative and what we’re building at carazocreative.com.
What’s your main goal for this feature?
Carolina Monestel: My main goal is to share the story behind Carazo Creative and the evolution of Cora from technology we built to solve our own challenges into a SaaS product. I’d also like to connect with other founders, business leaders, and potential partners who are thinking about how AI can make marketing more efficient without losing the human expertise behind great strategy and creative work.
What’s your top priority for growth right now?
Carolina Monestel: Our top priority is growing the SaaS side of the business following the release of Cora. That means expanding adoption, learning from how people use the platform, continuing to develop its capabilities, and building a scalable growth model around the product while continuing to grow Carazo Creative’s agency business.
