Ask any salesperson how much information they would like on a prospective customer, and you will never hear the end of it. That is the premise driving the crowded sales intelligence market, which today has services that can do everything from helping to identify prospects and surface background about them, to even writing the pitch and performing autonomous follow-ups. But sales teams need more than data; they want context. Sumble, a startup out of San Francisco, is trying to provide that context by trawling the web across social media, job boards, company sites, regulatory filings, and so on, to surface information about what is happening inside companies.
The brainchild of Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, the founders of the data science and machine learning community Kaggle, Sumble uses a knowledge graph underpinned by large language models to connect the various data points it gathers. The result is a comprehensive view of a company’s technographic data, which includes which tools are used in which departments, any projects being launched or run, its organizational chart, what technology a company might be looking to adopt, and crucially, who to contact.
But given how crowded this market already is, from incumbents to myriad AI sales development representatives, the question is whether the world really needs more. Goldbloom says the startup’s approach seems to be working. He told TechCrunch that since the startup launched in April 2024, it has signed 17 enterprise customers, including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercel, and Elastic, and it has tens of thousands of users in total. About 30 percent of its users pay for a Pro subscription, either themselves or their company does, and so far, growth has been driven by word of mouth. The startup declined to share details of its revenue, but revenue is understood to have increased by 550 percent year-over-year.
What tends to happen is the service goes viral inside a company. It will go from one to 500 monthly active users in a company over a six-month period. The spread normally happens within a Slack channel, then within a single team, then within an office, and then within that entire company. Goldbloom said traction, the quality of customers, and strong customer retention played a big role in catching investors’ attention. The startup emerged from stealth with 38.5 million dollars in funding. Coatue led an 8.5 million dollar seed round, while Canaan Partners led a 30 million dollar Series A. AIX Ventures, Square Peg, Bloomberg Beta, Zetta, and angel investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, also invested.
Notably, Sumble’s co-founders have attracted investors they are quite familiar with. Rich Boyle, currently a general partner at Canaan, was a board observer at Kaggle, while Bloomberg Beta and Zetta were also on Kaggle’s cap table. Goldbloom co-founded AIX Ventures, though he said he stepped away from the firm when it considered the investment in Sumble.
Still, Sumble faces a lot of competition. Challengers include Apollo.io, Slintel, SalesLoft, Cognism, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, HubSpot, and Outreach, among others who deliver either more focused point solutions or all-in-one sales IT toolkits. Since Sumble currently uses publicly available data, there is little to stop others from doing what it does currently.
Goldbloom, however, is confident that Sumble’s moat is deeper than it looks at first sight, thanks to how its knowledge graph is structured, covering about 2.6 million companies around the world. The way the company thinks about it is that the more data added into the knowledge graph, the richer the corpus will be. They view the richness of the knowledge graph as a massive source of defensibility.
Sumble is also counting on the continued adoption of large language models to help it continue to scale as it expects to see people using AI along with its service. The way the company structures its data makes the knowledge graph very query-able by large language models. The idea is that you can ask a model about a company’s tech stack grounded by Sumble’s data. The company thinks AI will change the data vendor landscape a lot such that having a knowledge graph structure as a way to feed context into the large language model is going to be a key part of the ecosystem.
The service is currently offered as a web app and via an API. There is also a paid plan that offers more features like integrations into workflows and customer relationship management systems, as well as notifications when a development at a prospect may be of interest.