Sumble, a San Francisco-based startup, has emerged from stealth mode with a $38.5 million funding round, led by Coatue and Canaan Partners. Founded by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, the former co-founders of Kaggle, Sumble aims to revolutionize sales intelligence by providing AI-powered context. The company's unique approach involves using a knowledge graph underpinned by large language models to connect various data points, offering a comprehensive view of a company's technographic data.
The crowded sales intelligence market, which includes services for identifying prospects, gathering background information, and even writing pitches, is where Sumble sees its potential. Sales teams, however, desire more than just data; they crave context. Sumble addresses this by scraping the web, including social media, job boards, company sites, and regulatory filings, to gather insights into what's happening within companies.
Goldbloom highlights the startup's impressive traction, having signed 19 enterprise customers since its launch in April 2024, including industry leaders like Snowflake, Figma, and Elastic. With tens of thousands of users and a 550% year-over-year revenue increase, Sumble's word-of-mouth growth is notable. The company's viral spread within companies, often starting in Slack channels and spreading to entire offices, showcases its appeal.
Despite the competition, Sumble's founders believe their approach is working. They attribute this success to the quality of customers, strong customer retention, and the richness of their knowledge graph, which covers 2.6 million companies worldwide. Goldbloom emphasizes that the more data they add, the richer the knowledge graph becomes, creating a formidable barrier to entry for competitors.
Sumble's strategy also involves leveraging the continued adoption of large language models. By structuring their data in a way that is highly queryable by these models, Sumble aims to become a key part of the LLM ecosystem. The service is currently available as a web app and via API, with a paid plan offering advanced features like workflow integrations and CRM notifications.
However, Sumble faces competition from established players like Apollo.io, Slintel, and HubSpot. Goldbloom remains confident in Sumble's unique position, emphasizing the depth of their knowledge graph and its potential to shape the data vendor landscape alongside AI advancements.
