Northern Pixels / About
About
Northern Pixels is a two-person senior team with a specialist bench behind it. We’re not advisors who studied go-to-market from the outside. We built and ran it inside tech startups, alongside founders and commercial teams, and all three companies exited.
Three exits
New category technology that enterprise buyers couldn’t evaluate on their own. In each case the breakthrough came from outside voices, not louder ones.
Mark: founding head of marketing
A crowded category with far better-funded competitors. Winning meant becoming the name industry voices, partners and analysts cited by default — the position no competitor could buy their way into quickly. Mark led marketing as the company grew from under $500K to $30M ARR.
Mark: founding head of marketing
An early machine-learning detection system, sold to regulated buyers whose careers end with one wrong call. Specialist press, broadcast and national media, built alongside the team’s own technology and sales work, helped turn an unknown company into an emerging category leader.
Mark: led marketing communications
A cryptography company selling into a market with no established category and no analysts covering it. Building the credibility layer was what allowed the market to define the problem before we could be positioned as the answer to it.
The People
President & Founder · Three exits
Mark has run marketing inside three tech startups, and all three were acquired: OptoSecurity (by Vanderlande, part of Toyota Industries) and TrueContext (by Battery Ventures), where he was founding head of marketing, and Zero-Knowledge Systems (by AppDirect), where he led marketing communications.
In each case the hard part wasn’t the product. It was convincing enterprise buyers to trust a company they’d never heard of — and the way through was always the same: find the voices those buyers already trusted, and give them a real reason to speak.
He has also led marketing and communications projects for the Canadian Space Agency’s Microgravity Sciences and RADARSAT programs, and for Rolls-Royce’s Aerospace and Industrial & Marine divisions, so hardware, long sales cycles and engineering-led buyers are familiar ground.
Long-term client Flyscan, an AI-powered aerial pipeline integrity company, ranked 8th on the 2026 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, with revenue growth of 5,465% from fiscal 2022 to 2025. In 2023, on a six-month contract, he served as Chief Marketing Officer to DistriQ, Quebec’s Quantum Innovation Zone, backed by more than $435M in public and private commitments.
Mark designs and activates the influence strategy that connects a company’s existing go-to-market engine to the voices that shape buying decisions, stepping in as CMO where that leadership is missing. He runs the work himself, deploys the specialist team around it, and is on every account, every week.
He is the author of Influence and Effect, a field guide to how markets trust disruptive technology. Read the white paper →
VP, Market Strategy & Communications
Danika builds the narrative architecture that turns a good technology into a category position — then earns the outside voices that make it credible.
She has done it through to an exit. At TrueContext she worked alongside Mark to build the category position that a strong product and sales team carried into a crowded, better-funded market, through to acquisition by Battery Ventures.
On an engagement she owns the story: what category you’re in, why it exists, why you lead it, and whether that argument holds up under analyst scrutiny. Then she builds the relationships that get it told by others — tier-one media, industry analysts, the publications your buyers actually read. Not coverage for its own sake: recognition that shortens sales cycles, because buyers arrive having already heard of you from a source they trust.
The bench. Behind the two of us is a standing team — demand generation, editorial, analyst relations, partner marketing, web and marketing operations. One team, one strategy, no handoffs between suppliers who’ve never spoken.
What Founders Say
“Mark Scott was instrumental in shaping our foundational marketing strategy and catapulting us onto the global stage. His expertise secured us top-tier coverage in leading business and industry media, firmly establishing our position as an emerging category leader.”
Eric BergeronFounder & CEO, OptoSecurity
“Mark and his team significantly boosted our brand awareness, trust and credibility. We became the leading enterprise solution in our category.”
Alvaro PomboFounder & CEO, TrueContext
You can’t build trust fast enough. You can borrow it, from the customers, partners, media and advisors your buyers already believe, but borrowed credibility is a bridge loan: it opens the door, and results have to repay it. No single briefing, reference or article wins a market; enough of them, assembled with intent, decide one.
How we work
Mark is on every account, every week. That’s a real constraint rather than a positioning device — there are only so many hours in which it can be true. Add another client and the promise quietly becomes something else: a junior team, a weekly check-in, a strategy document that nobody runs.
So we keep the list short, and we say so plainly when there’s no room. When we do take an engagement, we’re in it — trust compounds over quarters, not weeks, and a firm juggling twenty accounts cannot stay in one long enough for that to happen.
One client position open for Q1 2027
What it costs
A senior, exit-proven CMO plus a specialist team, for less than the loaded cost of one mid-level marketing hire.
Start a conversation
Thirty minutes, and you’ll know where credibility is breaking down in your funnel and what we’d do about it. No pitch deck, no price list ambush.
One client position open for Q1 2027
Or email Mark directly: mark@northernpixels.com