Ask any salesperson how much information they’d like on a prospective customer and you’ll never hear the end of it. That’s the premise driving the crowded sales intelligence market, which today has services that can do everything from helping to identify prospects and surface background about them, to even writing the pitch and performing autonomous follow-ups.
But sales teams need more than data; they want context. Sumble, a startup out of San Francisco, is trying to provide that context by trawling the web across social media, job boards, company sites, regulatory filings and so on, to surface information about what’s happening inside companies.
The brainchild of Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, the founders of data science and machine learning community Kaggle, Sumble uses a knowledge graph underpinned by large language models to connect the various data points it gathers. The result, Goldbloom told TechCrunch, is a comprehensive view of a company’s technographic data — which tools are used in which departments, any projects being launched or run, its organizational chart, what tech a company might be looking to adopt, and crucially, who to contact.
But given how crowded this market already is, from incumbents to myriad AI sales development reps agents, the question is: does the world really need more?
Goldbloom says the startup’s approach seems to be working: He told TechCrunch that since the startup launched in April 2024, it’s signed 17 enterprise customers, including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercel and Elastic, and it has tens of thousands of users in total. About 30% of its users pay for a Pro subscription, either themselves or their company does, and so far, growth has been driven by word of mouth. The startup declined to share details of its revenue, but we understand revenue increased by 550% year-over-year.
“What tends to happen is, we go viral inside a company,” Goldbloom said. “We’ll go from 1 to 500 MAUs [monthly active users] in a company over a six-month period. And the way the spread happens is normally within a Slack channel, then within a single team, then within an office, and then within that company.”
Goldbloom said traction, the quality of customers, and strong customer retention played a big role in catching investors’ attention. The startup on Wednesday emerged from stealth with $38.5 million in funding — Coatue led an $8.5 million seed round, while Canaan Partners led a $30 million Series A. AIX Ventures, Square Peg, Bloomberg Beta, Zetta, and angel investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, also invested.
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