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Before the Analysts Arrived: How Quantexa Built the Decision Intelligence Category from Scratch

In January 2025, Gartner published its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Decision Intelligence. Quantexa was named a Leader.

That milestone took six years to reach. When Matt Hooper joined as CMO in 2019, the category he was about to build didn’t have a name, a competitive landscape, or a single analyst report behind it.

In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, Matt walked through what it actually takes to create a market category from nothing: the signals you look for before committing, the internal battles that never show up on a GTM roadmap, and why reaching category leadership is the starting line of a harder race — not the finish line.

Reading the Market Before Writing the Narrative

When Matt arrived at Quantexa, there was no positioning playbook. Early customers, strong technology, a founding team with clear ambition — but no defined category strategy.

His first move wasn’t to write a positioning deck. It was to study.

“You’re a little bit like Sherlock Holmes,” he says. “You’ve got to look into the market, you’ve got to look into the tech, you’ve got to look into the team — why they’re there — and really start to pull together that formulation.”

What he found was a convergence. Enterprises were sitting on massive volumes of structured and unstructured data, struggling to connect it, contextualize it, and turn it into decisions they could trust. Business intelligence tools built for visualization weren’t solving the problem. And in boardroom conversations, buyers were already articulating something different — not “show me the data,” but “how do we trust our decisions?”

That language was the category, before the category had a name.

“We’re going from BI to DI,” Matt explains. “It’s not about necessarily visualization of your data, but it’s how you connect it, contextualize it, and actually bring it into all sorts of different decisioning levels within an organization.”

The practical lesson: category signals don’t arrive in analyst reports. They arrive in the specific language buyers use when describing problems they don’t yet have a vendor for. That’s what you’re listening for.

The Bet Has to Be Calculated, Then Defended

Naming a category that doesn’t yet exist is not a consensus decision. There were no Magic Quadrants, no waves, no competitive frameworks to validate the direction. Matt made the call — but deliberately.

“You’ve got to be a little bit daring and you’ve got to take a calculated risk,” he says. “But you can hear whispers on the market. It might be the odd journalist, it might be the odd analyst in a briefing — and also, most importantly, talking to your clients and your partners.”

Getting the founding bet right is hard. What most operators underestimate is what comes after: the category strategy will get challenged internally at multiple points across the journey — not just at launch, but when new executives arrive, when the competitive landscape shifts, when board pressure mounts.

“You can’t force people into a position,” Matt says. “Everybody has got to own it — founders, CEO, stakeholders, board, advisory board. You’ve got to go and test your strategy. You’ve got to be able to articulate that strongly. It’s got to stand up to scrutiny.”

His test for holding conviction versus pivoting: are analysts starting to write about it independently? Are buyers using the category language in their own boardroom conversations, unprompted? Are partners beginning to reference the problem without your prompting? Those incremental external signals are what give you the evidence to hold the line when internal pressure pushes back — and they’re distinct from the internal enthusiasm that can convince a team they’re on the right path when they’re not.

Market Education Is a Sequence, Not a Spend

Once the category was defined, Quantexa faced the problem every category pioneer faces: you have to build market understanding before you can capture market demand. Matt approached this as a deliberate network-effect strategy rather than a budget problem.

“Start working with the industry analysts early,” he explains. “Start bringing their attention to what’s happening. If you’ve got a couple of really cool customer references — you only need a couple — start to bring those customer stories into the framework, start to highlight and almost encourage those analysts to go out and start to do their own research. Then they’ll start to write about it, then they’ll push it through their channels, then they’ll start to reference you as a pioneering organization.”

The structure matters here. Each step creates the conditions for the next: customer references give analysts something concrete to evaluate; analyst research gives journalists and influencers something to amplify; earned coverage gives prospective buyers something to discover independently. You’re not broadcasting — you’re engineering a sequence where each node in the network does work you couldn’t afford to do yourself.

This connects directly to a shift in buyer behavior that has made the sequence even more critical. “Organizations are doing research — self-driven and often anonymized research — a lot earlier in the buying cycle, where they’re looking at requirements, they’re even looking at vendors before they’ll even talk to them,” Matt says. Buyers are forming views about your category and your position in it before any sales conversation happens. Content and thought leadership that doesn’t reach them in that pre-engagement window — through the channels they’re actually using — doesn’t exist from their perspective, regardless of its quality.

What Category Leadership Actually Requires

Gartner’s Decision Intelligence Magic Quadrant was a validation point six years in the making. Matt frames it with precision.

“You’ve got no right to own the category,” he says. “You can’t say, well, we’re a leader, so we kind of own the category. No, you don’t own the category — but what makes you different in that category?”

For Quantexa, that answer has always been context. “We talk about ourselves as a context company. We bring context to data, we bring context to analytics, we bring context to AI.” The differentiation anchor predates the Magic Quadrant recognition — it was baked into the category narrative from the start, which is exactly the point. Differentiation within a category has to be established before the category formalizes, not after.

Sustaining that position requires two things working in parallel. First, tight alignment between product roadmap and category positioning — Matt describes this as non-negotiable. “There is a direct correlation obviously to your product strategy and your roadmap back to category, back to positioning. Those things have to be dovetailed.” Second, adapting to where buyers now discover and evaluate vendors.

“We don’t so much talk about search engine optimization anymore,” Matt says. “It’s about agency engine optimization — how you’re actually showing up in those LLM searches and prompts. That requires a very different strategy.”

Category leaders who built visibility through traditional search and don’t adapt to LLM-driven discovery will find their position eroding in the channels where the next generation of buyers is doing their research. The category took six years to build. That’s not a reason to protect it cautiously — it’s a reason to keep moving.

Listen to the full conversation with Matt Hooper on Unicorn Marketers.