Although LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, one of the areas where they have been most popular so far is in sales. A startup named 1Mind, co-founded by Amanda Kahlow, has been quietly deploying its sales agent, named Mindy, for about a year. On Monday, the startup announced a thirty million dollar Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures. This brings 1Mind’s total funding to forty million dollars.
Kahlow is well known in the sales and marketing technology world as the founder and former CEO of 6Sense, a lead-generation tool launched in 2013 that tracked signals across social media and other sites to identify potential customers. She left that company in 2020.
While the market for sales agents is already crowded, 1Mind and its agent Mindy are not focused on sending emails and making cold calls, which is a common approach. Instead, Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales and can manage the entire process up to closing a deal. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and can replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also function as an onboarding specialist for new customers.
The goal is to replicate the human experience across the sales process when buyers are actively interested. Mindy can join Zoom calls and act as the sales engineer. Kahlow refers to her AI agents as superhumans, though they are not human and do not possess superhuman powers. Each agent can be trained to understand a vast knowledge base that includes all of a company’s products, technical details, and competitive positioning.
The startup uses a mix of underlying large-language models from OpenAI and Google Gemini. To limit incorrect information, the agent uses deterministic AI, which provides guardrails. Once the agent learns corporate sales materials, it should recite that information accurately. It is also trained to state when it does not know an answer.
After a year of operations, 1Mind is being used by more than thirty companies, including HubSpot, LinkedIn, and New Relic, to pitch and close deals. Kahlow states that all of her company’s named customers have annual contracts, not experimental budgets, and the average contract value is six figures.
The company also uses the bot internally on its own sales calls. Kahlow went further by creating an avatar of herself named Amanda, which she used in her venture capital pitches. During due diligence with Battery Ventures, the avatar was used to navigate the data room and ask questions about case studies. The venture capital firm noted that the conversation design was very nuanced and that customers would have long conversations with the AI, often forgetting they were not talking to a human.
That avatar remains accessible via Kahlow’s LinkedIn page, where the public can interact with it. It can answer questions about 1Mind’s products and other topics, though it consistently steers the conversation back to 1Mind.
Kahlow believes that eventually, 1Mind and other agentic sales startups will replace higher-level account executive sales roles, or at least drastically change them. While the technology is not yet at the point of fully replacing the account executive, it is already replacing functions like the website, sales engineer, and customer success roles. She thinks the transition for account executives is currently a matter of trust, as buyers are not yet ready to sign large enterprise deals without a human involved.
Interestingly, she believes that once trust is established, agentic buyers will emerge, leading to transactions between AI agents that involve the direct transfer of information and requirements without human avatars.
In the meantime, 1Mind still employs humans, with forty-four current employees and seventy-one job openings, including roles for account executives.
The funding round included participation from Primary Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Operator Collective, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Success Venture Partners, as well as angel investors from companies including Monday.com, ZoomInfo, Databricks, Box, Gong, Braze, and Verkada.