# Case Study: We increased gaiia’s meetings booked by 21% > gaiia's outbound email was landing in spam. Fixing their DNS and authentication took their open rate from 35% to 50% and their conference demo bookings up 21%. **The short version:** gaiia's outbound email was landing in spam. We fixed their DNS records and email authentication, and their open rate went from 35% to 50% — a 43% lift that turned into 21% more demos booked at conferences. Their emails were reaching inboxes within a week. ![Two statistics side by side: a 43% open rate increase and 21% more demos booked](/images/figures/gaiia-case-results.png) > “On average our open rate went from 35% to 50% for cold prospecting potential leads attending conferences. This allowed us to book on average about 21% more demos while at conferences leading to a significant boost in brand visibility and customer acquisition.” > > — Shawn McIntyre, Head of Growth at gaiia ## Who gaiia is gaiia builds the operating system that internet providers run their business on. Most communications service providers stitch together somewhere between five and ten disconnected systems to keep the lights on — billing, provisioning, account management, field service, and the workflows that tie them together. gaiia replaces that pile with a single platform built on one data model, so a customer record, a truck roll, and an invoice are the same object rather than three systems arguing with each other. That matters for email more than it sounds. An ISP's platform is what sends the activation notice, the outage alert, the past-due reminder, and the appointment confirmation. When those messages land in spam, the support phone rings instead — and the provider pays for it twice. When we started working together, gaiia had just been carved out of oxio ([YC W2021](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gaiia)) and was early in building that platform out. They had 35 engineers and deep technical knowledge, but nobody whose job was email deliverability. **Where they are now (July 2026):** gaiia serves more than 300 ISPs across North America, including regional carriers and municipal broadband providers. In May 2026 the company raised a $40M Series B led by JMI Equity with participation from Inovia Capital, bringing total funding to $66M after three consecutive years of more than 3x revenue growth — with the founding team still in control. ## The problem: good email, wrong folder gaiia's team was doing everything right on the content side and still watching messages disappear. Prospects would mention, days later, that they had found an earlier email in spam. The causes were the ordinary ones, which is exactly why they are easy to miss without someone looking: - **DNS was not properly configured or monitored.** Records existed, but nothing was watching them or catching drift. - **Third-party sending tools were poorly integrated.** Each one sends on your behalf, and each one needs to be authorised to do it. - **Their email was not authenticated.** Without working SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, receiving servers had no reason to trust the mail. The timing made it expensive. gaiia was selling into conferences, where a cold email either lands during the event or stops mattering. Every message in a spam folder was a meeting that never got booked. ## What we did Marc-André Campagna, gaiia's co-founder and CEO, brought us in. We audited what was sending mail on gaiia's behalf, rebuilt their [DNS and authentication records](/resources-post/email-deliverability-is-not-set-and-forget) so every legitimate sender was covered, and put monitoring in place so the configuration could not quietly rot. The work ran alongside gaiia's Head of Growth rather than being handed over as a report: > “The DNS process was overall very smooth. Sam & the team at Palisade created key checklists for our team & walked us through how to complete each step on calls to ensure there was no confusion.” > > — Shawn McIntyre, Head of Growth at gaiia Implementation was quick, and their email was reaching inboxes within a week. Monitoring continued after that — deliverability is not a one-time fix, because every new tool and every DNS change is a chance to break it again. ## The results ![gaiia's open rate before and after Palisade: 35% rising to 50%](/images/figures/gaiia-case-open-rate.png) - **Open rate: 35% → 50%.** A 43% increase, driven by messages reaching the inbox instead of the spam folder. - **21% more demos booked** at conferences, which is where that open rate mattered most. - **Engineering time returned.** gaiia's growth and IT teams stopped hand-managing DNS and authentication records and went back to the product. - **A verified sending domain**, so the next tool gaiia adds starts from a configuration that already works. > “Choosing to collaborate with Palisade was a game-changer for gaiia. From the outset, their team showcased their expertise, pinpointing the email problems and rolling out effective solutions almost instantly. This didn't just improve our email communication; allowed us to get our brand in front of key decision makers and ultimately acquire customers.” > > — Marc-André Campagna, co-founder and CEO of gaiia ## Why it mattered to the sales team The numbers are the headline, but the change gaiia describes is about confidence. When you cannot trust that your email arrives, you stop trusting your pipeline. > “Our increased deliverability has given us as a sales organization the confidence that potential customers are receiving responses to their questions, our value added content, and ultimately allowing us to book more demos.” > > — Shawn McIntyre, Head of Growth at gaiia ## Related reading - [Palisade Raises a 1.5M$ Pre-Seed led by Boreal Ventures](/resources-post/palisade-raises-a-1-5m-pre-seed-led-by-boreal-ventures)