LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, but one of the most popular areas so far is sales. 1mind, a startup co-founded by Amanda Carlow, has been quietly shipping a reseller 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 funding to $40 million, the company said.
Kahlow is well known in the sales and marketing technology world as the founder and former CEO of 6sense. It was launched in 2013 as a lead generation tool that tracks social media and other site-wide signals to identify potential customers. She left in 2020.
The dealership market is already crowded, but 1mind and its agency, Mindy, don’t do what most agencies do: send emails and make cold calls. The market is so crowded that even her previous company, 6sense, is recruiting agents.
“I’m not playing outbound,” Carlow told TechCrunch. Mindy handles inbound sales and is intended to “close the deal,” Carlow said. The agent will be used to expand the self-service website and replace sales engineers on large corporate transaction calls, Carlow said. You can also become an onboarding specialist who brings in new customers.
“Our goal is to truly recreate the human experience throughout the go-to-market, when a user has an intent, when a buyer is interested — whether they’re on your website or on a Zoom call — she can come along for the ride and be a sales engineer,” Carlow added, referring to Mindy with anthropomorphic pronouns.
Carlow even calls the AI agents “superhumans,” but they are not human and do not have superhuman powers like in the comics.
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However, each agent can be trained to understand an extensive knowledge base that covers all of a company’s products, technical details, and competitive position.
The startup uses a combination of underlying large-scale language models such as OpenAI and Google Gemini, but the agent uses deterministic AI to limit hallucinations, both Carlow and Mindy say (I invited the agent to the conference call). Deterministic AI provides guardrails so that once an agent ingests a company’s sales materials, it must recite that information without deviation. Plus, Mindy is trained to say she doesn’t know the answer.
After a year of operation, 1mind is used by more than 30 companies, including HubSpot, LinkedIn, and New Relic, to propose and close deals. Carlow said all of the company’s designated customers have annual contracts rather than “experimental” budgets, with “average contracts in six figures.”
The company also uses the bot for internal sales calls. But Carlow went further. She created an avatar of herself, Amanda, and took it to a VC pitch.
During Battery Ventures’ due diligence, “We used this to go through the data room and ask a lot of questions about case studies and things like that,” Battery partner Neeraj Agrawal told TechCrunch about Avatar Amanda. A data room refers to a stack of data that startups share with VCs about their companies.
“Conversation design is very nuanced, including what case studies to share and when,” he said. The VC also determined that customers were having long back-and-forth conversations, an indication that they could forget they were talking to an AI.
The avatar is still accessible through Mr. Carlow’s LinkedIn page, and the public can interact with it. In addition to answering questions about 1mind’s products, we can also answer questions in other areas, such as Carlow’s perspective as a woman in technology. However, when you chat with it, it will always try to bend the conversation in one direction, just like the human Carlow.
Eventually, 1mind and other agency sales startups will replace high-end account executive sales jobs, Carlow said. Or at least radically rethink it.
“We’re not yet at the point where we’re completely replacing AE. We’re replacing websites. We’re replacing sales engineers, we’re replacing customer success, but the relationship there (AE to customer) is still there,” she says. “Over time, I think a lot of what AE does now will go away.”
She believes this is primarily a trust issue at this point. Agentic technology is so new that buyers looking to sign large corporate deals aren’t ready to close without a human.
Interestingly, she believes (and is already in the process of building) that once trust is established, transactions between agents will no longer involve human avatars, but instead will be a transfer of information and requirements.
Meanwhile, 1mind is still hiring people, with 44 people in sales, including in sales, and 71 job openings, including account executives.
1mind said the round included participation from Primary Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Operator Collective, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Success Venture Partners, as well as angels from Monday.com, ZoomInfo, Databricks, Box, Gong, Braze, and Verkada.
