Although LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, one of the areas where they’ve been most popular so far is in sales. 1Mind, a startup co-founded by Amanda Kahlow, has been quietly shipping its sales agent, named Mindy, for about a year.
On Monday, the startup announced a $30 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures. This brings 1Mind’s total raise to $40 million, the company says.
Kahlow is well known in the sales and marketing tech world as the founder and former CEO of 6Sense. It was launched in 2013 as a lead-generation tool that tracked signals across social media and other sites to identify potential customers. She left in 2020.
While the sales agent market is already crowded, 1Mind, and its agent, named Mindy, aren’t doing what most of them do: sending emails and making cold calls. That’s a crowded market where even her previous firm, 6Sense, offers agents.
“I’m not playing in outbound,” Kahlow tells TechCrunch. Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales, going all the way to “closing the deal,” Kahlow says. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and, Kahlow says, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also be the onboarding specialist, setting up new customers.
“Our goal is to truly replicate the human experience across go-to-market when you have intent, when buyers are leaning in: they come to your website, or they’re in a zoom call. She can ride along and be the sales engineer,” Kahlow adds, referring to Mindy with the anthropomorphic pronoun.
Kahlow even goes so far as to call her AI agents “superhumans,” though they are neither human nor do they possess comic-book-style superhuman powers.
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Each agent can, however, be trained to understand an expansive knowledge base that encompasses all of a company’s products, technical details, competitive positions.
While the startup uses a mix of underlying large-language models including OpenAI andG oogle Gemini, the agent limits hallucinations by using deterministic AI, both Kahlow and Mindy said (I invited the agent to our call). Deterministic AI provides guardrails so once the agent ingests corporate sales materials, it should recite that info without deviation. Beyond that, Mindy is trained to say she doesn’t know an answer
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