The numbers Saurabh Tripathi will quote at you are not the ones he is proudest of.
Twenty crore rupees in managed advertising spend across Meta, Google, LinkedIn and DV360. Forty-three brands across six countries. A lifestyle brand whose Instagram following he grew from fifty thousand to four hundred and fifty thousand in twelve months. A news publication taken from zero to 1.8 million monthly organic readers in six. A solar AC brand scaled from a cold start to a thousand leads a month on Meta. A fintech startup whose SEO traffic he grew from a thousand clicks a month to fifteen thousand.
He will tell you these things if you ask. They are not the point.
The point, Tripathi says, is what he learned about marketing inside companies that paid him to do it before he started telling other companies how to do theirs.
“Ten years in the room where the numbers are argued,” is how he describes it on his personal site. The room, in his case, was a tech blog he started in Madhya Pradesh while still studying engineering at MITS Gwalior, then a series of agency and in-house roles across digital marketing, then government campaigns, fintech growth work, and consulting for D2C brands. He picked up an executive MBA in digital marketing from IIBMS Mumbai along the way. He kept a log.
The log, refined into a thesis, became Opus Momentum.
The Bhopal-headquartered agency, which Tripathi founded in December 2024, finished its first calendar year with thirty-five clients on its roster, retention at ninety-six percent, and an active client list spread across India, the United States, Canada, and Australia. That is faster than most agencies grow, and faster than most agencies make their first international hire. Tripathi will admit it is faster than he expected.
What he is less keen to admit, but does anyway, is that the agency exists because he got tired of watching marketing teams ship work that did not move numbers.
“There is an entire industry built around looking busy,” he says. “Posting calendars. Engagement reports. Brand decks that nobody reads. A lot of it is theatre. It costs the client money and it does not change their business.”
That diagnosis, blunt enough to be uncomfortable, is the operating thesis of Opus Momentum. The agency’s positioning, which Tripathi has rewritten three times in twelve months, currently reads: “Not an activity-first agency. A strategy-led execution partner.” The site lists seven services, organised into growth work (SEO, generative engine optimisation, performance marketing, social media) and brand-and-build work (websites, branding, marketing strategy). The differentiator, Tripathi argues, is not the service mix, which is standard. It is that the agency refuses work it does not believe will deliver.
“We have turned down clients in our first year,” he says. “If a brand wants twelve posts a month and that is the whole brief, we say no. That is not a strategy. We are not interested in selling that.”
This is the part of the conversation where founders usually slide into founder-speak. Tripathi does not. He tells a specific story about a prospect that wanted to spend forty lakhs a year on performance ads with no website fixes, no funnel review, and no attribution setup. Opus Momentum walked. The prospect, Tripathi says, signed with another agency, blew the budget, and was back six months later. They are now a client.
Bhopal was not the obvious place to set this up. India’s marketing industry concentrates in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Gurgaon. Tier-two cities have historically supplied talent to those metros rather than running their own agencies. Tripathi grew up in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, moved to Gwalior for engineering, and settled in Bhopal during his corporate years. When the time came to start something, he stayed.
“There was no reason to move,” he says. “The cost base is lower, the talent is real, and clients do not care where the agency is incorporated if the work is good. The first US client found us through LinkedIn. The Australian clients came through referral. Geography is not the constraint people think it is.”
The next twelve months, according to the founder, are about depth, not breadth. Opus Momentum is doubling down on generative engine optimisation, the discipline of getting brands to surface in AI search results from systems like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Tripathi believes this will be the most important shift in search since mobile-first indexing. The agency is also building case studies properly, hiring a senior strategist, and signing what Tripathi calls “fewer, bigger” client commitments.
“I do not want a hundred clients,” he says. “I want fifty that we can actually move.”
Whether the strategy holds is the question every agency founder eventually has to answer. For now, the early signs are that Opus Momentum is doing what most one-year-old agencies do not, which is keeping its clients. Ninety-six percent of them, by the agency’s own count.