Bounti, a pioneer in autonomous AI products, came out of stealth and announced it has secured $16 million in seed funding led by Google Ventures, with participation from Floodgate, Bloomberg Beta, Haystack, Octave Ventures, and MS&AD. Additionally, the company announced that Silicon Valley veteran Lew Cirne, founder of New Relic – acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG for $6.5 billion in November 2023 – is its first independent board member.
“We’re going to fix something that is broken about sales and customer engagement today,” said Matt Cooley, Bounti co-founder. The explosion of AI products has eroded personalization and human connection, and if you’re paying attention, you can tell that customers are exhausted with outreach that doesn’t connect to their needs.
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“At Bounti, we’re creating technology that empowers sales, marketing, and customer success teams to focus on meaningful human work, and this investment shows that our vision is one that the industry believes in. Let’s create AI-powered tools that enhance our people, not replace them.”
Founded by Cooley and fellow Silicon Valley veteran Ashar Rizqi, Bounti introduces the world’s first full-stack, full-funnel agentic AI teammate platform, designed to enhance the efficiency and productivity of sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Bounti frees sales teams from non-revenue generating work, allowing them to connect personally, bringing back the authenticity and effectiveness in customer relationships.
“Turning human-led services into AI-augmented software is the future of how businesses can use AI effectively,” Rizqi said. “We are far away from AGI, and the problems in using AI to make sales autonomous are sophisticated and require deep expertise that comes from real, trained humans. With a Bounti engagement, you get paired with cutting-edge software and a highly trained professional in the latest sales methodologies to accelerate your revenue goals – focusing on outcomes and not just software usage. We will use our funding to invest aggressively in expanding capabilities across both the software platform and human-in-the-loop services component.”
Unlike traditional AI tools, Bounti’s first teammate, specializing in prospecting, delivers capabilities that automate research and personalization work at blazing speed and large scale. This significantly reduces the time spent on mundane tasks and allows sales teams to focus on the customer.
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- The Bounti teammate takes a research-first approach, in which the details of a prospect company drive the outreach. Within ten minutes, you can have 500+ companies thoroughly researched for you, with buyers identified and personalized emails generated.Unlike others in this space, Bounti does not simply automate the mass delivery of emails with a firm belief that humans must be involved.Within 5 minutes the AI teammate researches hundreds of companies for just 1 sales rep, finding thousands of buyers while keeping information fresh via a streaming LLM architecture.Highly personalized outreach options rooted in up-to-the-minute research are served up to the rep in seconds.Besides this AI augmentation model, customers can choose to hand off the entire prospecting function to Bounti to run with highly trained sales professionals.
“Bounti is an incredible time saver,” said Bernie Kassar, Bounti customer and founder and CEO of Latitude 39 (former CCO of Xactly). “We couldn’t enable people fast enough or expect our sales team to produce this level of insight in days, let alone minutes. Bounti allows for intelligent conversations to happen much faster by removing the mundane work that bogs everyone down. You only get one chance to make a first impression.”
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Google Ventures, leaders of the round, were impressed by Bounti’s AI-powered vision: “We spent several years getting to know the Bounti founding team, and Ashar Rizqi and Matt Cooley truly stood out. Their blend of profound technical expertise and go-to-market leadership is unmatched,” said Sangeen Zeb, General Partner at Google Ventures. “We’ve been impressed by Bounti’s rapid development of a strong enterprise customer pipeline and the delivery of tangible value at the application layer. We share Bounti’s vision that AI will transform knowledge work as we know it, and we’re excited to support the team as they bring real AI-driven value to go-to-market teams.”
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