Sumble emerges from stealth with $38.5M to bring AI-powered context to sales intelligence

Ask any salesperson how much information they want from a potential customer and you’ll never hear the end of it. This is the foundation driving the crowdsale intelligence market, where today there are services that can do everything from help Identify potential and surface background About them, even writing pitches and performing autonomous follow-ups.

But sales teams need more than data; They want context. sambalA San Francisco startup is trying to provide that context by trawling the web across social media, job boards, company sites, regulatory filings and more, to uncover information about what’s going on inside companies.

The brainchild of Anthony Goldblum and Ben Hamner, founders of the data science and machine learning community. KaggleSumble uses a knowledge graph underpinned by large language models to connect the various data points it collects. The result, Goldbloom told TechCrunch, is a comprehensive view of a company’s technical data — what tools are used in which departments, what projects are underway or underway, its organizational chart, which companies are looking to adopt which technologies and, importantly, who to contact.

But how crowded this market is already, starting from the given positions Countless AI Sales Development Representative AgentsThe 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 has signed on 17 enterprise customers, including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercell, and Elastic, and has thousands of users in total. About 30% of its users pay for a Pro subscription, either by themselves or their company, and so far, growth has been driven by word of mouth. The startup declined to share its revenue details, but we understand revenue grew by 550% year-on-year.

“What tends to happen is, we go viral within a company,” Goldbloom said. “We will go from 1 to 500 MAUs [monthly active users] A six month period in a company. And the way that spread happens is usually within a Slack channel, then within a single team, then within an office, and then within that organization.”

Traction, customer value and strong customer retention played a big role in attracting investor attention, Goldbloom said. Wednesday’s startup emerged with $38.5 million in funding from Stealth — 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, former FCEO Marc Benioff and invested.

Notably, Sambal’s co-founders have attracted investors with whom they are quite familiar. Rich Boyle, now a general partner at Canaan, was Kaggle’s board observer, while Bloomberg Beta and Zeta were also at Kaggle’s cap table. And Goldbloom co-founded AIX Ventures, though he told TechCrunch that he would step away from the firm when it considered investing in Samble.

Still, Sambal faces a lot of competition. Challengers include Apollo.io, Slintel, SalesLoft, Cognism, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, HubSpot and Outreach, which offer either more focused point solutions or all-in-one sales IT toolkits. And since Samble uses currently publicly available data, there’s nothing stopping others from doing what it currently does.

Goldbloom, however, is confident that Sambal’s moat is deeper than it appears at first glance, thanks to how its knowledge graph is structured, covering some 2.6 million companies around the world.

“The way we think about it, the more data we add to the knowledge graph, the richer the corpus becomes. We see the richness of the knowledge graph as a huge source of defensibility,” he said.

Sambal is also counting on the continued adoption of large language models to help it continue to scale as it expects people to use AI with its services. “The way we structure our data is that the knowledge graph will be very searchable by big language models […] The idea is you can ask ChatGPT about the Apple text stack, or you can ask ChatGPT about the Apple tech stack based on our data,” Goldbloom said.

“We think AI is going to change the data vendor landscape so much that having knowledge graph structures as a way to feed context into large language models is going to be a key part of the LLM ecosystem,” he added.

The service is currently offered as a web app and through an API, and there is also a paid plan that offers more features such as workflow and CRM integration, as well as notifications when a prospect may be of interest.