The Startup That Reps At Cursor, Perplexity And Other AI Leaders Use To Boost Sales
Unify has raised $40 million in Series B funding for its AI-driven tools to boost revenue pipelines, valuing it at $260 million.
The Upshot
Unify co-founder Austin Hughes is in a rush. His business: providing software tools to other AI startups in land grabs of their own.
Take Anysphere, which uses Unify’s AI-enabled software to boost sales of Cursor, its popular code editing tool. Cursor’s website is swamped with visitors, especially recently as Windsurf, a leading rival, has been messily acquired. Anysphere leans on Unify to automate a process by which only the most promising of those interested parties receive emails from its sales team – and only if someone else isn’t already in touch with their company yet.
A multi-hour process is set up in minutes and runs behind the scenes. “Our unique vantage point is always: right person, right timing, right message,” Hughes tells Upstarts. “We’re building for a very condensed team of [sales reps] to be able to punch way above their weight, with software on their side.”
It’s a pitch that has resonated especially with other fast-moving startups, especially in AI. Early customers including Decagon, Perplexity and Together.ai, as well as Flock Safety and SoFi, use Unify’s software tool to arm rank-and-file salespeople with everything they need to automate that outbound process, from signals of purchase intent to data on the prospect, as well as the mechanism to send a sequence of messages by email and LinkedIn.
Customers spent a record amount with Unify in June, helping it reach $5.6 million in annualized revenue for the month. Sales are growing 17% month-over-month and accelerating, with leading customers now signed to contracts in the low- to mid-six figures.
And while Unify’s mission is to use software to help teams make more with less, to capitalize on its opportunity, the startup needs a lot more humans than its current team of 40. So Hughes has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Battery Ventures, which values the startup at $260 million. Other participating investors include OpenAI’s Startup Fund, Emergence Capital, Thrive Capital, Abstract, TCP and Capital 49.
“The message of, ‘if you build it, they will come,’ is just no longer true today,” Hughes tells Upstarts. “A lot of what’s going to happen in our category will happen over the next two years. You’ve got to go after it as aggressively as you can.”
Unify’s growth is notable, but it also stands out for how it is fitting in with some customers alongside another promising startup we’ve previously covered, Clay. In this new go-to-market software tech stack, companies like Cursor and Perplexity use both companies’ tools together: Clay to enrich data and put together target lists of ideal or extra-promising customers for outreach, Unify to more tactically respond to opportunities coming in.
Hughes calls himself a “big admirer” of Clay and its CEO, Kareem Amin, and for now, is careful to play nice. But the two overlap already on some features. Bumping elbows is inevitable, as both go after a similar cadre of tech’s highest-flying businesses like Anthropic, OpenAI and Ramp.
Then there’s a bigger question: even if you believe that Unify’s end product – more targeted messages, even personalized ones – doesn’t do away with sales reps, is it good for everyone else? Or does it help set a new normal where AI-personalized emails flood your inbox even more, putting more work on potential buyers to sift through the noise?
For Hughes, the answer is all about the execution. So long as his product is useful, it’ll help surface tools that we need, when we need them – we won’t care who sent them. “People have a lot of other things on their plate,” he says. “They don’t really want to be thinking about how your cold email was personalized.”
More on Unify – and how it’s helping fuel the AI software race – below.
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Founder onramp
When Hughes joined Ramp in 2020, he was on a mission to eventually start a company himself. A Bay Area native who attended Rice University and spent his first years out of college in investment banking, then a junior investor role at SoftBank, he joined Ramp when the fintech unicorn had about 40 employees.
Hughes worked closely with Ramp co-founder Gene Lee on growth, in a hybrid revenue and product role. He studied its CEO Eric Glyman and other co-founder, Karim Atiyeh, particularly for how they worked to try to overtake more established players in expense management software.
“One of the things the Ramp founders understood more deeply than most folks was that distribution is the core problem that companies face,” Hughes says.
By 2022, as Hughes was “blown away” by OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3, he felt restless to launch his own company. He teamed up with a college classmate, Connor Heggie, who was working as a research engineer in machine learning at another growth-stage startup, Scale AI; Heggie joined as CTO.
Their mission: tackle the “mess” of connecting data to go-to-market software at a tactical, execution level for sales and growth employees, so that the right person would be hit with the right message at the right time.
There was plenty of low-hanging fruit, Hughes says: visitors to company websites only leave their email addresses 5% or less of the time, he says; even then, the company doesn’t automatically know if that person is the best one to approach about purchasing a license, or with whom else at that prospect they’ve been in touch.
Clay had unlocked a way for GTM leaders to pull in dozens of data sources to know better information about what prospects to prioritize, and how; Unify’s approach was to arm the sales development representatives (SDRs) or business development representatives (BDRs), the juniormost, often recent college-graduate staff in a sales organization, so they could deliver interested likely customers to more senior account executives (AEs, to give you the full crash course in sales title shorthand) to close.
At first, Hughes’ and Heggie’s software strung together a handful of integrations using APIs; the system would break and need fixing every two or three days. But it could send a personalized email to a prospect from start to finish in 15 minutes.
Startup Navattic, which sells software for interactive product demos, wasn’t converting as many signups for its free trial into paying customers as growth lead Ethan Dursht hoped. By setting up automated emails based on the prospect’s industry so that they’d see success cases within their field, such as fintech leads hearing about Ramp’s or Coupa’s success, he changed that.
A second-time buyer of Unify, Dursht says his previous startup closed a $50,000 deal sourced by Unify within its first 10 days; in his first week using it at Navattic; Unify delivered more than $100,000 in pipeline, leading to 10 meetings. “The big thing is that we didn’t want to leave revenue on the table,” Dursht says. “Speed to lead is pretty critical.”
At Cursor, GTM engineering specialist George Hou says speed was also the startup’s most important criteria. “We don’t think we’ll win by waiting,” he tells Upstarts. “We need to set the pace, define the category and build deep, lasting relationships with our customers.”
Unify is Cursor’s “command center” for outbound email, Hou says. Most importantly, its constant updating with the startup’s CRM ensures that Cursor staff aren’t hitting up multiple stakeholders within a prospect company, or sending an intro email to someone already mid-process to purchase Cursor’s code editor.
“You can feel safe and sleep well at night knowing that your outbound efforts aren’t just spraying across different accounts, and that you’re maintaining your brand image,” he says.
Unification costs
From Upstarts’ vantage point, Unify faces two big questions: is it really so different, and innovative, compared to Clay and the field? And what are the implications of its tech proliferating – and chances of it creating more annoyance than value for everyone else?
On the competitive front, it’s no accident that the two power users that Unify connected to Upstarts – Cursor and Navattic – are happy customers of both. Each company uses Clay primarily for data enrichment, creating detailed lists of its ideal customers and who their points-of-contact would be, while turning to Unify for the execution of its campaigns.
“They’re both go-to-market playgrounds, but Clay is more of one where I can do anything,” says Dursht at Navattic. “With a team of BDRs, I wouldn’t want them touching it, because it’s a lot more complex.”
To stand out as more than just an email tool, meanwhile, Unify has worked to add LinkedIn messages to its outbound flow, and a dialer for phone calls is in the works. The company is also testing how to help companies with product intent-driven sales, meaning how they reach out to potential customers already trying a product for free or individually.
Between 20% and 30% of Unify’s own sales pipeline is currently generated by dogfooding its own product, the company says.
As for its impact, Hughes argues that Unify is different from startups trying to build fully automated ‘AI SDRs’ that replace humans; Unify is set up instead to help smaller numbers of “hyper-powered” sales reps reach better efficiency, he says.
On the end customer side, there’s the question of clutter. If Unify and its competitors make it easier to send personalized messages to a company’s prospects across email, LinkedIn and elsewhere, it’s easy to picture a world where such messages overwhelm that buyer’s inbox, putting the onus on them to sift through each to see what personal touches or tailored use cases are more legit.
Dharmesh Thakker, who led Battery’s investment in Unify, argues that executives are already facing the challenge of evaluating more options for each vendor choice. Better info on each is ultimately useful, he argues. “Knowing that a competitor is engaging in a similar use, or that my industry is going through a similar transition, that message will resonate a lot more with me,” Thakker says.
Demonstrating value is what matters most to Hughes, whether it’s a human or AI pulling the trigger. Unify’s CEO notes that he has already personally purchased software for his startup via a cold email – a tool offered by Carta – because it surfaced when he needed to solve its exact problem.
“I don’t think about whether it was personalized by an AI or a human,” Hughes says.