New York, NY, Feb. 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For decades, business partnerships have been built on instinct, introductions and sometimes luck.
Executives network at conferences. Founders trade introductions through investors. Creators sign brand deals based on audience overlap or perceived alignment. The process, while often effective, has historically been difficult to scale or standardize.
A new artificial intelligence platform called onSpark is attempting to change that by applying behavioral analytics and trust-based data modeling to partnership development — an area of business that has largely resisted technological standardization.
Launched this month by entrepreneur Kyle Kane in collaboration with Martell Ventures, onSpark positions itself as an AI-powered partnership discovery and deal orchestration platform designed to help companies identify, evaluate and execute strategic collaborations using structured data rather than intuition alone.
Its creators describe the platform as an attempt to bring predictability to one of the most influential — and historically unpredictable — drivers of business growth.
The Untapped Tech Opportunity in Partnerships
While software has transformed marketing, sales and operations, partnership management has remained largely manual. According to a 2026 PwC AI Business Survey, 72 percent of executives say their organizations rely heavily on informal relationship networks when identifying strategic partners, despite investing heavily in data-driven systems across nearly every other business function.
Meanwhile, Harvard Business Review reported in a 2025 analysis of corporate alliance performance that nearly half of strategic partnerships fail to meet expectations, often due to misaligned goals, communication breakdowns or trust issues rather than flawed financial planning.
These challenges have made partnerships an unusually attractive target for AI innovation.
“Partnerships represent a massive blind spot in enterprise data strategy,” said Dr. Andrew Valence, a technology researcher specializing in AI-driven decision modeling. “They’re enormously impactful financially but traditionally lack the structured datasets that AI systems rely on. That’s starting to change.”
onSpark is among a new generation of platforms attempting to build those datasets.
How onSpark’s Partnership Discovery Engine Works
At the core of the platform is what the company calls a Partnership Readiness Engine — an AI framework designed to determine whether two organizations or individuals are likely to collaborate effectively before they pursue a deal.
Unlike conventional matching platforms that rely primarily on demographic or audience metrics, onSpark attempts to evaluate compatibility across behavioral, emotional and cognitive dimensions.
The platform analyzes potential partners using a multi-layered data enrichment process that includes:
• Emotional markers
• Behavioral patterns
• Linguistic preferences
• Trust indicators
• Risk factors
• Cognitive styles
• Collaboration dynamics
These signals are combined with traditional business alignment factors such as audience overlap, revenue incentives and growth stage compatibility.
According to the company, the goal is to generate trust and fit scores that help users prioritize partnerships with the highest probability of long-term success.
Breaking Down the Data Layers
Emotional Markers
The platform analyzes communication tone, sentiment patterns and response behaviors to identify how individuals or teams respond to pressure, negotiation and feedback. These insights are intended to help predict conflict resolution styles and relationship durability.
Behavioral Patterns
onSpark evaluates decision-making habits, execution speed and consistency in follow-through. These signals attempt to measure whether potential partners share similar work rhythms and operational discipline.
Linguistic Preferences
Language analysis is used to detect communication styles, such as direct versus collaborative dialogue, strategic versus tactical framing and emotional versus analytical expression. The system attempts to identify compatibility in how partners exchange information.
Trust Indicators
Trust scoring incorporates factors such as historical collaboration success, referral networks and reliability patterns. According to the company, this data helps highlight both strong potential alliances and early warning signals.
Risk Factors
The platform analyzes execution gaps, misaligned incentives and potential communication breakdown patterns to identify partnerships that may require additional safeguards or may be unsuitable altogether.
Cognitive Styles
Using personality and workplace behavior frameworks, including DISC, Myers-Briggs and Enneagram, the platform attempts to map thinking preferences, problem-solving approaches and leadership tendencies.
Collaboration Dynamics
Finally, onSpark evaluates how partners function within team environments, including leadership balance, accountability structure and collaborative workflow alignment.
From Discovery to Execution
Once potential partnerships are identified, the platform guides users through what it describes as a four-stage collaboration lifecycle: Discover, Verify, Launch and Amplify.
The Discover phase focuses on identifying aligned partners through AI-driven matching. The Verify stage evaluates behavioral and strategic compatibility. Launch provides deal structuring frameworks and partnership playbooks, while Amplify supports scaling successful collaborations across additional channels or audiences.
The company says the system is designed to act as a co-pilot for partnership development, helping users move from discovery to execution more efficiently.
Why Behavioral AI Is Entering Business Decision-Making
onSpark’s technology reflects a broader movement toward incorporating behavioral analytics into enterprise systems.
PwC’s 2026 Trust in AI report found that 68 percent of executives believe AI systems that incorporate human behavioral insights will outperform traditional predictive models within five years, particularly in areas involving collaboration and negotiation.
Harvard Business Review has similarly highlighted the growing importance of “relationship intelligence” in organizational strategy, noting that companies that map internal and external collaboration networks often outperform competitors in innovation and revenue growth.
Still, applying behavioral analytics to business partnerships raises questions about reliability, privacy and over-automation.
“Human relationships remain complex,” said Valence. “The promise of these platforms is not replacing human judgment but augmenting it with patterns that would otherwise be invisible.”
Early Enterprise and Startup Adoption
According to its launch announcement, onSpark’s methodology has already been tested by both enterprise organizations and startup founders.
HubSpot’s partnerships team reported measurable increases in qualified lead generation while working with the company’s approach. The platform also cites an early-stage founder, Chris Seidman, who reportedly generated $160,000 in partnership-driven revenue within a single month using collaborations identified through the system.
While early case studies do not guarantee long-term results, they highlight growing interest in partnership optimization tools.
The Martell Ventures Influence and SaaS Expansion
onSpark was developed in collaboration with Martell Ventures, an investment and advisory firm focused on scaling software companies. Dan Martell, founder of the firm, believes partnership infrastructure may become as essential as marketing automation or customer relationship management systems.
“Partnerships are one of the most powerful growth drivers in business,” Martell said in the company announcement. “The challenge has always been turning them into repeatable systems.”
Industry analysts suggest that if partnership discovery platforms gain widespread adoption, they could create a new category of enterprise software focused on relationship intelligence.
The Future of AI-Driven Collaboration
The launch of onSpark reflects a growing shift toward what researchers describe as network-based business strategy — an approach where organizations scale through interconnected ecosystems rather than standalone operations.
Whether AI can successfully model and predict partnership success remains an open question. However, as companies increasingly rely on collaboration for innovation, distribution and revenue growth, the demand for structured partnership intelligence is expected to grow.
onSpark is currently offering limited early access to founders, creators, investors and operators through its platform at onspark.com.
If the technology delivers on its promise, it could signal the beginning of a new era in which business partnerships evolve from relationship-driven art into data-informed science.
About onSpark
onSpark is an AI–powered partnership engine for discovery and deal orchestration designed to help companies, creators, brands and operators identify strategic collaborators and execute revenue-generating alliances. Founded by entrepreneur Kyle Kane in collaboration with Martell Ventures, the platform focuses on transforming partnerships from informal networking and relationship management into a structured, data-informed business function.
The platform is built around a proprietary Partnership Readiness Engine that analyzes compatibility between potential collaborators using a combination of business alignment signals and behavioral intelligence. onSpark’s matching and evaluation process incorporates emotional markers, behavioral patterns, linguistic preferences, trust indicators, risk factors, cognitive styles and collaboration dynamics to help predict partnership performance and identify execution risks before agreements are finalized.
Through its four-stage partnership lifecycle — Discover, Verify, Launch and Amplify — onSpark provides users with AI-driven partner matching, deal structuring frameworks, performance tracking tools and scalable collaboration workflows. The company positions its technology as part of a growing category of relationship intelligence software designed to help organizations reduce acquisition costs, accelerate distribution and scale ecosystem-driven growth strategies.
onSpark is currently available through limited early access at onSpark.com.
Watch the onSpark teaser video on Youtube here.
Media Contact:
media@onspark.com
