Unify raises $40M Series B to automate sales research so reps can focus on creativity and outreach

Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Always a great segment. And we have our next guest already ready to join the show. Austin, welcome to the stream. Let's play that. I want to play that intro song a little bit. I like that intro song. Oh, maybe he's already here. Maybe you just get Ashton Hall.

We got an issue with the soundboard, but we're going to make a sound for you. A handcrafted sound. Kick us off with the news and an introduction on yourself. Thanks for having me, guys. Um, honored to be here everybody. I'm Austin, uh, co-founder and CEO here at UniFi.

Today, we just announced a $40 million series B led by Battery V. Wow. Led by who? Who? Doesn't matter. It does matter. Congratulations. Awesome firms. Uh, awesome firm leading awesome firms along for the ride. Awesome. uh be a bunch of questions, but uh give give us a quick history on yourself.

You said earlier was it the proudest day of your father's life was when you signed an offer to work at RAMP and then the second proudest is today. That's true. It was. Yes. It's uh it's been a it's been a big couple years for me with me and my dad.

Um took a lot of years going through college to get to that point, but um quick background story. So originally joined Rant back in 2020 uh on the uh on the growth product team. uh really attracted to just like the talent density that existed even back in that period of time.

Spent a couple years there uh working on the growth product team with a bunch of incredible folks I know you all know well including Sam Buck um you know folks like um Pville you had on the show the Crosby guys etc.

Um so ton of great folks spent a couple years there and uh spent a lot of time thinking about distribution from an engineeringled perspective and so joined uh saw everything that was happening with open AAI in 2022 and it felt like the nexus of go to market and AI was starting to happen didn't know that chatbt and things like that were were about to drop but ended up starting Unifi beginning of 2023 uh pretty quickly raised a seed round from a combination of openai thrive emergence and we're off to the races.

Um, fast forward two and a half years, we're a 50 person team today serving a bunch of incredible companies like Cursor, Perplexity, uh, you name it. And so, uh, just grateful grateful to be here. Okay, explain the product like I'm a newrad, uh, SDR.

So, if you're a newrad SDR, the pitch of the product is you used to have to push a million buttons just to get to the place where you could actually do something that was valuable to talk to a prospect. We take care of all that on your behalf. So, example is you might show up in the morning.

You're going to make your list of the 25 people that you want to reach out to based off of, okay, this person started a new job. I reached out to John in the past. He's now at this new thing. He started a new job or he got a new promotion. We'll make that list for you. We'll automate all that research.

We'll also deploy agents to go get 50 other data points for you. So, you can start from the 90 yard line and then you can just be polishing the messaging and the actual work that we've done for you.

But you don't have to you don't have to start by just like manually combing through LinkedIn or manually combing through a database like Crunchbase. So we'll do all that work for you. That makes sense.

What is the sentiment like among sales leaders uh all the way through kind of the the entry level roles uh STRs BDRs etc. just around AI broadly. I think the uh there's been a lot of dialogue recently around you know the core challenge with a lot of AI tooling right now is this amnesia.

So the the the the model is really smart but it can't remember sort of lessons from at any point in history. You know there's some memory but not the sort of hard one lessons that you get from going out and doing a hundred phone calls with customers things like that. Yeah, that's a really great question.

So, the evolution of the sentiment has changed over the years. So, 2023 we started the company. There was a lot of aversion to using AI to do the endtoend job because it just wasn't there. Wasn't remotely there.

Agents could sort of you could see them coming, but we weren't in a place where it felt like that value was tangible.

And so, it was really in early 24 where it started to feel like the world started to believe that even as a seller, the best thing for me to do was to adopt AI to try to automate a bunch of a bunch of what I'm doing. But to your point, exactly 24, it's been this like version 1. 0 of AI where products are dumb.

They they can do basic research tasks for you. They can do them over and over again, but they have no context that they've done that task four times in the past.

One of the things that we're really excited about that we launched a couple months ago is something we call our observation model, which is actually this underlying primitive that looks very different than anything else that's existed.

Basically looks like you have a memory associated with every person you've ever talked to. And that memory is not a database. It's actually a flexible set of context, just a big text doc basically that is every interaction and every piece of notable information between you and that prospect.

And so as an example, let's say we're talking about Perplexity. Perplexity has maybe reached out to um I don't know, Ford Ford Automotive in the past and they've got some record of all the sellers that they have and they've contacted them. They've gone back and forth. They may like maybe exchange a few ads.

um all this sort of data has usually existed in a bunch of different silos but we actually built this observation model to join all that together so you actually have one clear set of context and then when Unifi wants to understand hey what should I do next it can ask that set of context what do I know what's the most relevant thing that I can surface right now and let me go ahead and hit on that and so we really see that as being the evolution of where these AI products are going to go to just make them that much that much smarter and more powerful it feels like uh one of the really like just layup use cases for artificial intelligence in a sales context is just data hydration, cleaning up the CRM.

But I'm interested to hear about how high the walled gardens are in a business context. Um, we've heard stories about uh Glean getting push back from different uh big tech companies and it's one of those weird things where uh every company says, "Yeah, it's your data.

" Until I want to give it to their competitor potentially that's overlapping. So um what data sources are are are particularly like AI friendly these days and um and what is the shape of the of the garden and the walls of that garden these days?

It really depends on I think the overall data strategy for the company and just like what their strategy is built on. And so to give you one example Salesforce historically their advantage is built on being a fairly open ecosystem.

So Salesforce um the app exchange launched call it like 10 20 years ago at this point it's been building emotes around Salesforce as people have connected tens of applications into the product and that's sort of built the stickiness.

You'd have 25 different products that all integrate through Salesforce that happens through this open ecosystem of connectivity.

My my gut says is that the platforms that are built much more on open-endedness like something like a Salesforce are going to continue to remain open as that's the core value prop of the product and that's the reason why they have a mode itself.

But I think products that have historically been a little bit more walled off and so you know Slack is an example of that will probably continue to stay that way and trend even more in that direction. Generally speaking, people haven't been super privy to give out Slack information.

They wanted to keep that in especially within an organization and so I imagine we're going to see those things clamp down even further. And case in point is the is the glean example you brought up. Do you have a thesis around uh sales co-pilot type products?

You can imagine this is a sales call and you're you know running an LLM in real time to to give you the next answer. I don't think you guys have one of those uh in your suite of products, but I'm curious how you think about that category. It's definitely super powerful.

I mean, you see what's happening with with Chloe right now, right? And what's going up. question.

Let me uh let me just real quick uh it's wild though and I think uh we're only at the beginning of that period of time and I think the the way in which people absorb information is going to dramatically change over the course of the next couple years as we get more and more used to these products.

Today, the closest that we get to that in our product is that we've got uh a composer for for emails and for anything you want to do in Unifi. And next to that, you've got all these AI cont all these AI nuggets and AI research uh tidbits that we've done for you.

Alongside that, uh we're generally speaking believers that the faster your product is, the more real time it is, the more addictive it is to users, the more helpful it is to users in that context, especially in a work context. And so we're going to keep pushing the product in that direction.

Uh something like a clue is like the far-flung example of that. We're not quite there yet, but I imagine the world is going to keep moving that direction. That makes sense. I want to talk about uh uh you I mean your your your your website's tagline is scale your revenue team's creativity.

And I'm wondering if there's any sort of like just like really creative sales solutions. Like I was talking to Sam Blonde a while back. He was working with Parker Conrad for a long time and said like one of the best campaigns he ever did as a sales guy. He's like a SDR for a long time.

Um was in head of sales was like sending bottles of champagne to people because like they just open it then they have a phone call. They have this nice thing and so it becomes incredibly rude not to respond to the email. Exactly.

And so I'm wondering about these like weird squishy like the handwritten note and and in many ways I feel like these creative uh these creative deal closers like the the unexpected text message from a friend who's already using the product is the thing that gets you to actually go and say, "Yep, I'm ready to onboard fully.

I get my company on this new product. " Um, but is it is there are there any are there any like world I feel like a lot of the creativity in in in uh sales is specifically showing the client that I'm not using software for this. I handwritten that note. I I I sent your I got your address.

I sent you a bottle of champagne. And so is the goal to more just like remove all the barriers to let the humans do the creative things or do you think that there's a world where we can use AI tools to uh speed up those creative out ofthe-box solutions that might be uniquely tailored to just this one company strategy.

They're the only one that does this weird thing, but it's working and they found this alpha and they stick with it for a long time. Yeah, big fan of of Sam's and uh he's done a bunch of incredible outbound campaigns over the years.

My thinking is that what will happen is what always the thought behind all these things and the reason why it matters this all comes back to taste right I think people in more and more are talking about taste in the world of AI and it's all about knowing what's relevant at the time knowing what's going to resonate with someone personally and being able to do something that feels really delightful um so it's an example like one thing that we did as part of our fundrais announcement today we put out uh about 25 cameos that we had custom build for everyone we've got one for you guys on the way right now so we'll have it to you later but like things like that that are based off of someone's personal experience and show that you thought about it.

Doesn't really matter if you use chat GBT in the brainstorming process, right? What matters is that you got the idea that originated from something special and then the actual end delivery is the same quality you put out as a human, what the person feels. Yep. Exactly. Exactly.

But I think ultimately today AI doesn't feel and so it can't really use that judgment. There's a reason why like in the world of content and in the world of the stuff that we do here, it's like you just can't AI that. It just feels bland and generic. And I think that's going to continue to be true in a sales context.

What you need is a human behind the scenes who's providing that little touch of like what it means to be a person, what it means to be a friend. And so we'll continue to lean into experiences that make it easier to stay on top of those friendly experiences, but um but just get easier over time to actually execute.

It's great. Anything else? Uh I got a bunch more questions, but we'll save it for another time. Thank you for joining. Congratulations. Congratulations on the new raise. Get back to work. Get back. I'm sure you guys have a bunch of people to hire to uh deploy that capital. We'll