Although LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, one of the areas where they have been most popular so far is sales. 1 mind, A startup co-founded by Amanda Kahlo has been quietly shipping its sales agents, named Mindy, for about a year.
On Monday, the startup announced a $30 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures. The company says that this brings the total earnings of 1Mind to $40 million.
Kahlo is best known in the sales and marketing technology world as the founder and former CEO of 6Sense. It was launched in 2013 as a lead-generation tool that tracked signals on 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’t doing what most of them do: sending emails and cold calling. That’s a crowded market where his previous company, 6Sense, also offers agents.
“I’m not playing in the outbound,” Kahlo told TechCrunch. Kahlo says Mindy’s intention is to handle inbound sales, leading up to “closing the deal.” This agent is used to enhance self-service websites and, Kahlo says, to replace the sales engineer on calls for larger enterprise deals. This could also be an onboarding specialist who sets up new customers.
“Our goal is to really replicate the human experience when going to market, when you have the intent, when buyers are perusing: they come to your website, or they’re in a Zoom call. She can follow along and be the sales engineer,” Kahlo says, referring to Mindy with an anthropomorphic pronoun.
Kahlo even calls her AI agents “superhumans”, although they are neither human nor do they have comic-book-style superhuman powers.
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However, each agent can be trained to understand a comprehensive knowledge base that includes all of the company’s products, technical details, competitive positions, and more.
While the startup uses a mix of underlying big-language models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, the agent limits hallucinations by using deterministic AI, both Kahlo and Mindy said (I invited the agent onto our call). Deterministic AI provides guardrails so that once an agent absorbs corporate sales material, he or she must repeat that information without any deviation. Furthermore, Mindy is trained to say she doesn’t know an answer.
With one year of operation, 1Mind is being used by over 30 companies including HubSpot, LinkedIn, and New Relic to pitch and close deals. Kahlo says her company’s entire roster of named clients have annual contracts, not “experimental” budgets, and “the average contract is six figures.”
The company also uses the bot internally on its sales calls. But Kahlo is also lost to her father. 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 into data rooms, ask a lot of questions on things like case studies,” Battery partner Neeraj Aggarwal told TechCrunch about Avatar Amanda. Data room refers to the trove of data that a startup will share about itself with VCs.
“The design of the conversation is very nuanced, like which case studies it shares and when,” he said. VC also determined that customers were having longer conversations, indicating that they would forget that they were talking to an AI.
That avatar can still be accessed Kahlo’s LinkedIn pageWhere the public can interact with it. It may answer questions about 1Mind’s products as well as other areas, such as Kahlo’s thoughts about being a woman in technology. However, when interacting with it, it will – like a human Kahlo – always attempt to turn the conversation towards 1Mind.
Ultimately, Kahlo says, 1Mind and other agentic sales startups will replace high-level account executive sales roles as well. Or at least drastically reimagine them.
“We’re not yet where we’re completely replacing the AE. We’re replacing the website. We’re replacing the sales engineer, customer success, but that (AE/customer) relationship is still happening,” she says. “I think over time, a lot of what AE is doing now will be eliminated.”
He believes it is mostly an issue of trust at the moment. Agent technology is so new that a buyer who wants to sign a large enterprise deal is unwilling to do so without a human being.
Interestingly, once trust is developed, that agent thinks about (and is already building trust with) buyers. Agent-to-agent transactions will not involve human avatars, but rather the transfer of information and requirements.
Meanwhile, 1Mind still employs humans: 44 of them, including sales, with 71 job vacancies, including account executives.
1Mind said the round included participation from Primary Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Operator Collective, Harmonic Growth Partners and Success Venture Partners and angels from Monday.com, ZoomInfo, Databricks, Box, Gong, Braze and Verkada.
