Christopher O’Donnell has a hobby. He likes music and playing the guitar, but most of all he loves building software. That’s why three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Daya CRM for the age of AI.
Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that someone has to fill out and update, Day learns everything about a person from conversations they’ve had with the company, emails and public records like LinkedIn.
O’Donnell knows CRM. He was responsible for creating one of the most popular out there, HubSpot’s.
O’Donnell spent more than 10 years at HubSpot, initially supercharging the company’s marketing automation solution and later tapped by founder and former CEO Brian Halligan to build HubSpot’s customer relationship management tool. That CRM later became the product HubSpot is best known for, eventually helping O’Donnell earn the title of Chief Product Officer.
While O’Donnell enjoyed being an executive at HubSpot, which now has a market cap of nearly $30 billion, he missed building new software. So in 2021, he left HubSpot to work at Arianna Huffington’s Thrive. He was also simultaneously involved with ProfitWell, a business he co-founded with Boots and sold to Paddle for $200 million in 2022. O’Donnell didn’t see himself at Thrive long-term, so he reached a point when he asked himself: “Retire?” he said. “I wasn’t really sure what to do.”
And then OpenAI launched ChatGPT. The new technology inspired him to start something new and do what he really loves: building software.
He’s back with Michael Pici, previously VP of sales and product at HubSpot. “Mike is exceptional,” said O’Donnell, “There aren’t many people who can hang out with engineers and designers all day and then turn around and run an entire sales organization.”
The duo felt that advances in genetic artificial intelligence offered a perfect opportunity to create a product they had both always “dreamed of”.
In mid-2023, they started working on Day.ai, a CRM powered by genetic artificial intelligence.
“Day builds all this information behind the scenes, and all you have to do is ask her a question and she comes back with the answers,” O’Donnell said. This means Day’s CRM learns what it needs about people automatically behind the scenes.
So no more updating and manual data entry to keep information up to date.
On Thursday, the company is announcing a $4 million round led by Sequoia.
For now, Day’s CRM is available through an invite-only beta, but O’Donnell and Pici have a lofty long-term goal of making current versions of CRMs irrelevant.
But don’t expect Day to raise more funds anytime soon. Sequoia’s round is, for now, all the funding the company needs.
“There are four of us in the team. I pay myself minimum wage,” O’Donnell said. “We are happy as clams. It’s about the fun of starting over.”
