Ask any salesperson how much information they’d like on a prospect and you’ll never hear the end. That’s the principle driving the bustling sales intelligence market, which today has services that can do everything from help identify and background prospects, to even write the pitch and perform autonomous follow-up.
But sales teams need more than data. they want context. Sumblea San Francisco startup, tries to provide that context by scouring the web for social media, job boards, company websites, regulatory filings, etc., to surface information about what’s going on inside companies.
The brainchild of Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, founders of the data science and machine learning community KaggleSumble uses a knowledge graph supported by large language models to connect the various data points it collects. The result, Goldbloom told TechCrunch, is a comprehensive picture of a company’s technology data — what tools are being used in which departments, any projects that are starting or running, its organizational chart, what technology a company wants to adopt and, most importantly, who to contact.
But given how crowded this market already is, from incumbents to myriad AI sales development agents, the question is: does the world really need more?
Goldbloom believes so, and says the startup’s approach seems to be working: he told TechCrunch that since the startup launched in April 2024, it has signed on 19 enterprise customers, including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercel, and Elastic, and has tens of thousands of users in total. About 30% of its users pay for a Pro subscription (either themselves or their company) and so far, growth is driven by word of mouth. The startup declined to share details about its revenue, but we understand that revenue grew by 550% year-over-year.
“What tends to happen is we go viral within a company,” Goldbloom said. “We’re going from 1 to 500 MAU [monthly active users] in a company over a period of six months. And the way it spreads is usually within a Slack channel, then within a 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 on Wednesday emerged from stealth with $38.5 million in funding — 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 angels investors, including former Salesforce CEO Marc Beniofft, also former CEO Marc Beniofft Friubed.
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In particular, the co-founders of Sumble have attracted investors with whom they are quite familiar. Rich Boyle, currently a general partner at Canaan, was an observer on the Kaggle board, while Bloomberg Beta and Zetta were also at the Kaggle table. And Goldbloom co-founded AIX Ventures and is an investment partner, though he told TechCrunch he was “out of the room” when the company was considering investing in Sumble.
However, Sumble faces a lot of competition. Challengers include Apollo.io, Slintel, SalesLoft, Cognism, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, HubSpot, and Outreach, among others that offer either more focused point solutions or all-in-one sales IT components. And since Sumble is currently using publicly available data, there’s little to stop others from doing what it’s currently doing.
Goldbloom, however, is convinced that Sumble’s moat is deeper than it appears at first glance, thanks to how its knowledge graph, which covers some 2.6 million companies worldwide, is structured.
“The way we think about it, the more data we add to the knowledge graph, the richer the corpus will be. We see the richness of the knowledge graph as a huge source of defensibility,” he said.
Sumble is also counting on continued adoption of large language models to help it continue to scale as it expects to see people using AI alongside its service. “The way we structure our data is such that the knowledge graph is and will always be very capable of exploring large language models […] The idea is that you can ask ChatGPT about Apple’s text stack, or you can ask ChatGPT about Apple’s technology stack based on our data,” Goldbloom said.
“We believe that AI will greatly change the data provider landscape, so having a knowledge graph structure as a way to feed the framework into the big language model will be a key part of the LLM ecosystem,” he added.
The service is currently offered as a web app and via API, and there’s also a paid plan that offers more features, such as workflow and CRM integrations, as well as notifications when a development in a prospect might be of interest.
