Katzenberg-Backed Netomi Expands Leadership as It Bets on AI-Tailored Websites

The artificial intelligence startup Netomi, backed by former DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, is changing its leadership team as it tries to move AI out of the chat window in the corner of a website and into the website itself. Justin Wexler, a longtime general partner at Katzenberg’s venture firm WNDR and a Netomi board member for five years, has become the president of Netomi. He will work alongside Netomi founder and chief executive Puneet Mehta. Wexler has moved to a venture partner role at WNDR. Netomi has also hired Ryan Boughan, former president and chief operating officer of the CMO network PTTOW!, as senior vice president of growth. Boughan will also lead the Netomi Advisory Board, which includes 3C Ventures CEO Michael Kassan, MMA Global chairman Norm de Greve, and Brand Innovators CEO Marc Sternberg. The changes follow a $110 million round in April from Adobe Ventures, WNDR, and Accenture Ventures, through which Katzenberg joined the Netomi board. Netomi is now a key bet in the WNDR portfolio, according to Wexler, who ADWEEK named to its 2026 AI Power 50 in March. The firm holds two board seats at the company, which Wexler called a rare arrangement, and a general partner leaving for a portfolio company had no precedent there, he said. “We’ve never had a circumstance where a general partner goes into the company,” Wexler said. “But my personal conviction is this is such a massive opportunity.” The agentic web Netomi got its start more than a decade ago as msg.ai, building some of the first branded chatbots on Facebook Messenger. Its early backers included OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. But as OpenAI was preparing to launch ChatGPT in November 2022, Mehta called an emergency board meeting and persuaded the company to rebuild its platform from scratch around large language models. That platform now powers customer-facing AI for some of the largest brands in the country, including the main chat on DraftKings’ website and United Airlines’ mobile app, according to Wexler. Its next product, Agentic Digital Experience (ADX), aims to extend this thesis further. Rather than a responsive chatbot on a standard website, ADX will make the website itself responsive, tailoring the information and user experience to each visitor. To do so, the system will draw on a variety of signals. These include customer profile data, browsing history, outside events like weather or flight delays, and behavioral cues like where a cursor hesitates. When intent is unclear, the page can also ask a brief question. The system will then reorder content in real time around what it infers the person wants. Critically for companies, it can adapt to these user preferences while staying within prescribed brand rules and business policies, according to Wexler. In its responsiveness to its environment, the product will resemble a kind of Waymo for digital experience, he said. “It’s constantly ingesting thousands of signals and deciding what the absolute best set of pixels, the best digital experience to render is,” Wexler said. Why brands may need it Websites and mobile apps are among the primary points of contact between brands and consumers, which makes the ability to personalize those experiences a critical advantage for marketers. The new offering comes as emerging technology, like agents and answer engines, increasingly promises to intermediate the digital experience, performing tasks like shopping and researching on behalf of users. “Consumer attention is completely going away,” Mehta said. “So this is going to really challenge the CMO’s job next year, because all of their martech, their entire philosophy around brand building, is based on attention.” As a result, fewer people may need to visit brand websites or use mobile apps. According to Katzenberg, this transformation will make the visits that do happen more valuable. Rather than eliminating the experience of digital browsing, the agentic web will give that experience a new purpose. “Everyone said that ecommerce was the end of physical retail, but it is not at all,” Katzenberg told ADWEEK. “It has made retail focus on the quality of that experience. The same thing will happen here.” The headline of this article has been changed to reflect that Netomi's leadership team has expanded.

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Katzenberg-Backed Netomi Expands Leadership as It Bets on AI-Tailored Websites

Justin Wexler, general partner at Katzenberg's venture firm, will join the AI startup

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