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. Recently, 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 sales agent market is already crowded, 1mind and its agent Mindy are not doing what most others do, such as sending emails and making cold calls. That particular market is very competitive, and even Kahlow’s previous firm, 6sense, offers similar agents. Kahlow states that she is not playing in the outbound sales space. Instead, Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales, going all the way to closing the deal. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and, according to Kahlow, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also function as the onboarding specialist, setting up new customers.
The company’s goal is to truly replicate the human experience across the go-to-market process when buyers are leaning in with intent, such as when they visit a website or are on a Zoom call. The agent can ride along and act as the sales engineer. Kahlow refers to Mindy with an anthropomorphic pronoun and even calls her AI agents superhumans, though they are neither human nor possess comic-book-style superhuman powers.
Each agent can be trained to understand an expansive knowledge base that encompasses all of a company’s products, technical details, and competitive positions. The startup uses a mix of underlying large-language models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini. The agent limits hallucinations by using deterministic AI, which provides guardrails so that once the agent ingests corporate sales materials, it should recite that information without deviation. Beyond that, Mindy is trained to say when she does not know an answer.
With a year of operations under its belt, 1mind is being used by more than thirty companies, including HubSpot, LinkedIn, and New Relic, to pitch and close deals. Kahlow says that her company’s entire roster of named customers all have annual contracts, not experimental budgets, and that the average contract is six figures. The company also uses the bot internally on its own sales calls.
Kahlow has gone even further by creating an avatar of herself named Amanda, which she took with her to VC pitches. During Battery Ventures’ due diligence, they used the avatar to go through the data room, asking lots of questions on things like case studies. A partner from the VC firm noted that the conversation design is very nuanced, determining what case studies it shares and when. The VC also found that customers were having long back-and-forth conversations, indicating they would forget they were talking to an AI.
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 areas, such as Kahlow’s views on being a woman in tech. However, during a conversation, it will always attempt to steer the discussion back toward 1mind.
Kahlow believes that eventually, 1mind and other agentic sales startups will replace higher-end account executive sales roles, or at least drastically reimagine them. She says they are not there yet, where they are fully replacing the account executive. Currently, they are replacing the website, the sales engineer, and customer success roles, but the relationship between the account executive and the customer is still happening. She thinks over time, a lot of what the account executive does now will go away.
She believes this is currently mostly a trust issue. Agentic technology is so new that a buyer looking to sign a large enterprise deal is not yet ready to do it without a human. Interestingly, once trust develops, she thinks agentic buyers will emerge, and she is already building for that future. Agent-to-agent transactions will not involve human avatars but will instead be transfers of information and requirements.
In the meantime, 1mind still employs humans, forty-four of them, including in sales, with seventy-one job openings, including for account executives. The recent funding round included participation from Primary Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Operator Collective, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Success Venture Partners, as well as angels from Monday.com, ZoomInfo, Databricks, Box, Gong, Braze, and Verkada.