Unify, an AI-powered startup that uses data to reach prospective buyers, has raised a $12 million Series A led by existing investors Emergence Capital and Thrive Capital. OpenAI Startup Fund, Neo, Abstract, 20Sales, and AltCap also participated in the round.
The 20-month-old company went through OpenAI’s Converge I accelerator last year and, following that program, secured a nearly $7 million seed round from the same group of investors.
Unify was co-founded by Austin Hughes, who spent several years leading Ramp’s sales outbound program. While working at Ramp, Hughes observed that cold email outreach was less successful than it had been in the past decade. This gave him the idea that sales, marketing and revenue operations teams should make better use of all available data to reach customers with personalized content right when they are about to buy.
Hughes teamed up with Connor Heggie, a machine learning research engineer at Scale AI, to work on AI-enhanced messaging that helps sales teams generate leads and close deals faster.
This is, of course, not a unique idea. One of the fastest growing segments of AI-empowered apps is AI sales development representative companies (AISDR). AISDR startups like 11x.ai, Reggie.ai, and Artisan are growing so quickly that VCs have been falling over themselves to invest at high valuations.
Although Unify relies on AI to target potential buyers, Hughes told TechCrunch that he doesn’t consider his company an AISDR. He prefers to consider his startup to be delivering what it calls “warm outbound” messaging. “We don’t compete with AISDRs,” Hughes said. “You can fine tune every piece of Unify: the copy, what you say, and the data sources you’re pulling from.”
For instance, Unify can pull data from CRMs and other data warehouses to help determine what to say to potential purchasers in its messages. It also scans online data sources to help identify prospects, and the signals that they are looking to buy.
Rather than focusing on the messaging piece, Hughes says that he looks up to companies like Zoominfo and Outbound.io as models for what he’s trying to build. “We view ourselves as a data company,” he said.
Unify may have a slightly different approach to AI sales outreach than AISDR companies, but one thing is clear: it’s also growing very quickly. The company’s revenue is already in the millions and its got a stream of customer logos on its website, counting companies like Justworks and Lattice as its customers.