Although LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, one of the areas where they’ve been most popular so far is in sales. 1mind, a startup co-founded by Amanda Kahlow, has been quietly shipping its sales agent, named Mindy, for about a year.
On Monday, the startup announced a $30 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures. This brings 1mind’s total raise to $40 million, the company says.
Kahlow is well known in the sales and marketing tech world as the founder and former CEO of 6sense. It was launched in 2013 as a lead-generation tool that tracked signals across social media and other sites to identify potential customers. She left in 2020.
While the sales agent market is already crowded, 1mind, and its agent, named Mindy, aren’ doing what most of them do: sending emails and making cold calls. That’s a crowded market where even her previous firm, 6sense, offers agents.
“I’m not playing in outbound,” Kahlow tells TechCrunch. Mindy is intended to handle inbound sales, going all the way to “closing the deal,” Kahlow says. This agent is used to augment self-service websites and, Kahlow says, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. It can also be the onboarding specialist, setting up new customers.
“Our goal is to truly replicate the human experience across go-to-market when you have intent, when buyers are leaning in: they come to your website, or they’re in a zoom call. She can ride along and be the sales engineer,” Kahlow adds, referring to Mindy with the anthropomorphic pronoun.
Kahlow even goes so far as to call her AI agents “superhumans,” though they are neither human nor do they possess comic-book-style superhuman powers.
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Each agent can, however, be trained to understand an expansive knowledge base that encompasses all of a company’s products, technical details, and competitive positions.
While the startup uses a mix of underlying large-language models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, the agent limits hallucinations by using deterministic AI, both Kahlow and Mindy said (I invited the agent to our call). Deterministic AI provides guardrails so once the agent ingests corporate sales materials, it should recite that info without deviation. Beyond that, Mindy is trained to say she doesn’t know an answer.
With a year of operations under its belt, 1mind is being used by more than 30 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 the “average contract is six figures.”
The company also uses the bot internally on its own sales calls. But Kahlow has gone even further. She created an avatar of herself, Amanda, and took it with her to her VC pitches.
During Battery Ventures’ due diligence, “we used it to go through the data room, asking lots of questions on things like case studies,” Battery partner Neeraj Agrawal told TechCrunch about the avatar Amanda. The data room refers to the stacks of data a startup will share about itself with a VC.
“The conversation design is very nuanced, like what case studies it shares and when,” he said. The VC also determined that customers were having long back-and-forth conversations, indicating that they would forget they were talking to an AI.
That avatar is still accessible via Kahlow’s LinkedIn page, where the public can interact with it. It can answer questions about 1mind’s products, but also other areas, like Kahlow’s views of being a woman in tech. However, having chatted with it, it will — much like the human Kahlow — always attempt to bend the conversation toward 1mind.
Eventually, Kahlow says, 1mind and other agentic sales startups will even replace higher-end account executive sales roles. Or at least drastically reimagine them.
“We’re not there yet where we’re fully replacing the AE. We’re replacing the website. We’re replacing the sales engineer, customer success, but that [AE/customer] relationship there is still happening,” she says. “I think over time, a lot of what the AE is doing right now will go away.”
She believes this is currently mostly a trust issue. Agentic tech is so new that a buyer looking to sign an enormous enterprise deal isn’t ready to do it without a human.
Interestingly, once trust develops, she thinks (and is already building for) agent-to-agent transactions won’t involve human avatars but will instead be transfers of information and requirements.
In the meantime, 1mind still employs humans: 44 of them, including in sales, with 71 job openings, including for account execs.
The 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, 1mind said.
