If you ask any salesperson how much information they wish to have about potential clients, their requests likely seem endless. This fundamental need is driving the booming sales intelligence market, which today encompasses everything from identifying prospects and uncovering client backgrounds to crafting sales pitches and automating client follow-ups.
However, sales teams require more than just data; they increasingly need contextual information. San Francisco-based startup Sumble aims to meet this demand by aggregating data from various online platforms, including social media, job sites, corporate websites, and regulatory documents, to uncover internal dynamics within companies.
Founded by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner - co-founders of the data science and machine learning community Kaggle - Sumble employs knowledge graphs powered by large language models (LLMs) to link the collected data points. Goldbloom revealed to TechCrunch that the end result is a comprehensive view of a company’s technographic data, detailing the tools used by various departments, currently initiated or ongoing projects, organizational charts, potential technologies the company might embrace, and crucially, contact information for key stakeholders.
Despite the crowded landscape of the sales intelligence market, housing well-established players and numerous AI sales development representative tools, the question arises: is there still a need for more similar products?
Goldbloom indicated that Sumble's business model appears effective. Since its inception in April 2024, the company has secured contracts with 17 enterprise clients, including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercel, and Elastic, totaling tens of thousands of users. Approximately 30% of users (or their companies) have purchased the Pro subscription, and customer growth has been entirely driven by word of mouth. While Sumble hasn't disclosed specific revenue numbers, it is reported that revenue has surged by 550% year-over-year.
“Our product typically goes 'viral' within organizations,” Goldbloom said. “In one company, our monthly active users (MAUs) can expand from one person to 500 in just six months. The spread usually starts from a specific Slack channel, moves to an individual team, then cascades throughout the entire office, eventually covering the whole company.”
Goldbloom pointed out that the product's market appeal, quality client resources, and high customer retention rates have been significant factors in attracting investor interest. On October 22, Sumble officially exited stealth mode and announced the completion of a $38.5 million funding round, led by Coatue with an $8.5 million seed investment and by Canaan Partners with a $30 million Series A investment. Additionally, AIX Ventures, Square Peg, Bloomberg Beta, Zetta, and angel investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, participated in this funding round.
Notably, most of the investors attracted by Sumble's co-founders are long-time acquaintances: Rich Boyle, a current partner at Canaan, was previously an observer on Kaggle's board, and Bloomberg Beta and Zetta had also invested in Kaggle. Although Goldbloom is a co-founder of AIX Ventures, he informed TechCrunch that he had voluntarily recused himself from the investment decision-making process regarding Sumble.
Nonetheless, Sumble faces intense market competition. Competitors include Apollo.io, Slintel, SalesLoft, Cognism, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, HubSpot, and Outreach, all of which either provide focused point solutions or offer integrated sales IT toolkits. Moreover, since Sumble operates using publicly accessible data, other companies could theoretically replicate its existing business model, facing minimal technological barriers.
Despite this, Goldbloom remains confident. He believes that Sumble's knowledge graph architecture, covering around 2.6 million companies globally, provides a more substantial competitive moat than it appears on the surface.
“Our logic is that the more data we inject into the knowledge graph, the richer the data corpus becomes. We view the richness of our knowledge graphs as a key source of our competitive advantage,” he explained.
Sumble also anticipates scaling its business through the increasing prevalence of large language models, as the company expects that future users will integrate AI with their services. “Our data architecture is designed to ensure that the knowledge graph is always efficiently queryable by large language models... For example, a user could ask ChatGPT about 'Apple’s tech stack,' and the answer provided would be supported by our dataset,” Goldbloom said.
He added, “We believe that AI will significantly transform the competitive landscape for data providers; consequently, injecting contextual information into large language models via knowledge graphs will become a crucial component of the LLM ecosystem.”
Currently, Sumble’s services are primarily delivered through a web app and API interface. Moreover, the company has launched paid plans that include additional features, such as integrations with workflow and customer relationship management systems (CRM), and notifications to users when notable developments occur with potential clients.