Darkroom opens Shadow, its co-founder's AI workspace, starting at $120 a month

Darkroom co-founders Lucas DiPietrantonio and Jackson Corey opened Shadow, an AI workspace for marketing teams, to outside users on September 18th, with public beta pricing starting at $120 a month and higher tiers at $200 and $500. Darkroom said it acquired Shadow in 2026 and ran its roughly 130-person agency on the software for six months; the acquisition price and structure were not published. Shadow pulls a brand's advertising, commerce, analytics and creative material into a shared workspace where employees and AI agents use the same data and retain the reasoning behind earlier work.

Darkroom opens Shadow, its co-founder's AI workspace, starting at $120 a month Jackson Corey built Shadow after stepping back from agency operations; Darkroom acquired the sister company and ran on it for six months. By RuntimeWire Staff https://runtimewire.com/author/runtimewire-staff · Published Primary source: PR Newswire https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html Why it matters Darkroom is productizing nine years of agency operations instead of treating AI as a staff add-on. The public beta will test whether software developed inside one agency can produce the same reported efficiency gains for outside marketing teams. Darkroom https://www.darkroomagency.com/?ref=runtimewire co-founders Lucas DiPietrantonio https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasdipietrantonio?ref=runtimewire and Jackson Corey https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcorey/?ref=runtimewire opened https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire Shadow, an AI workspace for marketing teams https://www.shadow.co/?ref=runtimewire , to outside users on September 18th, turning the software developed by Corey into a standalone product after running Darkroom on it for six months. The public beta starts at $120 a month https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire , with higher tiers priced at $200 and $500. Shadow pulls a brand's advertising, commerce, analytics and creative material into a shared workspace where employees and AI agents can use the same data and retain the reasoning behind earlier work. Darkroom said it acquired Shadow in 2026 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire , although the acquisition price and structure were not published. The transaction brings Corey back to the center of the agency he helped start in 2017. Corey had stepped away from Darkroom's day-to-day operations before building Matter, an AI marketing product he introduced with engineer Taylor Kolasinski https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jcorey agents-marketingai-ecommerce2025-activity-7351297983075811329-hIcB?ref=runtimewire . Matter's product pitch closely tracked what became Shadow: persistent brand context, integrations with commerce and advertising platforms, and agents capable of working across channels. Shadow's current privacy policy identifies Matter AI as the operator of the service https://app.shadow.co/privacy-policy?ref=runtimewire . Darkroom's current leadership page lists Corey as chief product officer https://www.darkroomagency.com/about?ref=runtimewire and calls him the product mind behind Shadow. The September 18th announcement identified him as chief creative officer https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire . That shift captures what DiPietrantonio and Corey are trying to do with Darkroom: convert the operating knowledge of an agency into software the agency can sell separately. From student founders to a software-services company DiPietrantonio and Corey started Darkroom while DiPietrantonio was studying business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Corey was studying design and entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California. The pair expanded into creative and growth marketing for consumer brands, eventually building teams across paid media, marketplaces, retention, web development and performance creative. DiPietrantonio recently described Darkroom as a roughly 130-person agency https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lucasdipietrantonio while-most-of-the-industry-is-contracting-activity-7487909004954783745-Dpxs?ref=runtimewire . Darkroom says its client work has generated over $5B in attributable commerce revenue https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire , a figure for which it has not published a methodology or customer-level breakdown. Corey's move from creative leadership into software development grew out of a problem inside that larger organization. Marketing employees were adopting separate AI tools, each carrying a different slice of the brand's history and performance data. A strategist's agent could not see what a media buyer had learned, and useful context remained inside personal chat histories. "No one starts from zero again," Corey said in Darkroom's announcement https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire , describing Shadow's central product thesis. Corey initially introduced Matter as an "always-on" AI platform for marketing teams and said its three-person team was bootstrapped and speaking with investors. Darkroom later described Shadow as a sister company before bringing it into the agency. Darkroom acquired a product built by one of its founders around problems he had watched for years. Corey left daily agency management, developed the software and tested it inside Darkroom before the two operations were combined. Shadow sells shared context, with controls on execution Shadow connects to Meta, Google, Shopify, Klaviyo, TikTok, Amazon Seller, Amazon Ads, Amazon DSP, Walmart and Google Analytics. Documents and creative assets can come from services including Notion, Slack and Figma. Shadow says performance data is refreshed hourly and stored with historical backfill in normalized tables that users and agents can query. Teams work in shared threads and documents rather than passing AI output between private chat windows. Through the Model Context Protocol, Shadow can provide brand context to tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Cursor, then sync work back into the central workspace. That portability is a practical distribution choice. Shadow does not require a marketing department to standardize on one model provider. It aims to become the context and permissions layer underneath whichever models employees already use. The product can also propose changes to Meta and Google Ads budgets, bids and campaign statuses. Darkroom says Shadow shows the exact before-and-after values, requires human approval before execution, records changes in an audit trail and supports rollbacks for Google Ads. Those controls address the immediate risk created when an AI tool moves from producing reports to changing live advertising accounts. Shadow's pricing https://www.shadow.co/pricing?ref=runtimewire is based on usage rather than seats. The $120 Starter plan includes unlimited users, one brand space, five synced platform accounts and 5,000 monthly agent credits, which Shadow estimates at roughly 50 tasks. The $200 Core plan raises that allowance to 10,000 credits and 10 synced accounts. The $500 Max tier covers three brand spaces, 25,000 credits and 30 synced accounts. Enterprise pricing is customized. Darkroom tests Shadow on live client accounts Darkroom says its internal teams used Shadow across paid media, retention, marketplaces, creative and website work before the public release. According to Darkroom's internal measurement, reporting and decision-making time fell by over 80% https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/darkroom-acquired-shadow-the-ai-workspace-the-agency-runs-on-and-opened-it-to-every-marketing-team-302883225.html?ref=runtimewire . Darkroom also says a biweekly creative-performance report that took roughly two analyst hours per client can now be produced from one prompt, while post-signature onboarding fell from about two weeks to about three days. Those numbers come from Darkroom and have not been independently tested. They also describe work inside an agency whose employees helped shape the product, a friendlier setting than an outside marketing department with different processes and data quality. The public beta will test whether Shadow can reproduce those gains without Darkroom staff surrounding the software. DiPietrantonio's larger bet is a hybrid company that sells both expert labor and the operating system behind that labor. Shadow can be purchased without hiring Darkroom, while the agency gains a product it can deploy across client accounts and improve through daily use. Competitors are pursuing adjacent versions of the same idea. DOJO AI https://www.dojoai.com/?ref=runtimewire combines shared marketing context with cross-channel workflows, while Gradial https://gradial.com/blog/gradial-65m-series-c?ref=runtimewire raised a $65M Series C in June to automate enterprise marketing operations. Analytics vendors such as Triple Whale and Northbeam already sit close to the commerce data Shadow wants to organize. Darkroom's advantage is Corey's access to a live agency with employees, clients and recurring workflows available for testing. Its risk follows from the same relationship: outside customers must trust a product owned by an agency with its own services operation and client accounts. Shadow says it operates independently and can be adopted without engaging Darkroom. DiPietrantonio has described Shadow as the technology Darkroom's strategists should use to deliver client outcomes. For Corey, it completes a loop that began with design work: the agency's internal process has become a product, and the founder who stepped away to build it is back as Darkroom's product chief.