If you ask a salesperson how much information they would like to know about a prospect, they will never hear it all. This is the premise that drives the crowded sales intelligence market, which today includes services that can do everything from identifying leads and surfacing their backgrounds to crafting pitches and running autonomous follow-ups.
But sales teams need more than just data. They want context. Sumble, a San Francisco startup, seeks to provide context by surfacing information about what’s going on inside companies by searching the web, including social media, job boards, company sites, and regulatory filings.
The brainchild of Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, founders of the data science and machine learning community Kaggle, Sumble uses a knowledge graph backed by a large-scale language model to connect the various data points you collect. The result, Goldbloom told TechCrunch, is a comprehensive view of a company’s technical data: which departments use which tools, which projects are launched or running, the organizational chart, what technologies the company is implementing, and, importantly, who to contact.
But given that this market is already crowded, from incumbents to countless AI sales development professionals, the question is: Does the world really need more of this?
Goldbloom believes so, and said the startup’s approach seems to be working. He told TechCrunch that since the startup launched in April 2024, it has signed up 19 enterprise customers, including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercel, and Elastic, and has tens of thousands of users in total. About 30% of users pay for a Pro subscription (either by themselves or by a company), and so far growth has been driven by word of mouth. The startup declined to reveal revenue details, but understands that revenue has increased by 550% year-on-year.
“What often happens is that the virus spreads within the company,” Goldbloom said. “In a six-month period, you go from 1 to 500 MAUs (monthly active users) within a company. And the way that proliferation typically happens is within a Slack channel, then within a single team, then within an office, then within that company.”
Goldbloom said traction, customer quality and strong customer retention played a big role in attracting investor attention. The startup emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $38.5 million in funding. Coatue led the $8.5 million seed round and Canaan Partners led the $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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Remarkably, Sumble’s co-founders have attracted investors in the know. Rich Boyle, now general partner at Canaan, was a board observer at Kaggle, and Bloomberg Beta and Zetta were also on Kaggle’s cap table. Goldbloom, who is also a co-founder and investment partner at AIX Ventures, told TechCrunch that he “walked away” when the company considered investing in Sumble.
Still, Samburu faces plenty of competition. Challengers include Apollo.io, Slintel, SalesLoft, Cognism, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, HubSpot, and Outreach, among others, offering more focused point solutions and all-in-one sales IT toolkits. And since Sumble now uses publicly available data, there’s little to stop other companies from doing what Sumble is currently doing.
But Goldbloom believes Samburu’s moat is deeper than it first appears, thanks to the structure of its knowledge graph, which covers about 2.6 million companies around the world.
“The way we think about it, the more data you add to the knowledge graph, the richer the corpus becomes. We believe that the richness of the knowledge graph is a great source of defensive power,” he said.
Sumble also expects to continue to scale with continued adoption of large-scale language models, as people expect to use AI alongside its services. “The way we structure our data is what makes our knowledge graph highly queryable by large-scale language models (…) The idea is that we can ask ChatGPT about the Apple text stack, and we can ask ChatGPT about the Apple technology stack based on our data,” Goldbloom said.
“We believe AI will significantly change the landscape for data vendors, so having a knowledge graph structure as a way to feed context into large language models will be an important part of the LLM ecosystem,” he added.
This service is currently available as a web app via an API. There are also paid plans that offer more features, such as workflow, CRM integration, and notifications if you’re interested in lead development.
