LLM-powered AI agents are a fairly new phenomenon, but one of the most popular areas so far is sales. 1Mind, a startup co-founded by Amanda Carlow, has been quietly shipping a reseller 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 funding to $40 million, the company said.
Kahlow is well 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 tracks social media and other site-wide signals to identify potential customers. She left in 2020.
The dealership market is already crowded, but 1Mind and its agency, Mindy, don’t do what most agencies do: send emails and make cold calls. It’s a crowded market where even her previous company, 6Sense, offers representation.
“I’m not playing outbound,” Carlow told TechCrunch. Mindy handles inbound sales and is intended to “close the deal,” Carlow said. The agent will be used to expand the self-service website and replace sales engineers on large corporate transaction calls, Carlow said. You can also become an onboarding specialist who brings in new customers.
“Our goal is to truly recreate the human experience throughout the go-to-market, when a user has an intent, when a buyer is interested — whether they’re on your website or on a Zoom call — she can come along for the ride and be a sales engineer,” Carlow added, referring to Mindy with anthropomorphic pronouns.
Carlow even calls the AI agents “superhumans,” but they are not human and do not have superhuman powers like in the comics.
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However, each agent can be trained to understand an extensive knowledge base that covers all of a company’s products, technical details, and competitive position.
The startup uses a combination of underlying large-scale language models such as OpenAI and Google Gemini, but the agent uses deterministic AI to limit hallucinations, both Carlow and Mindy say (I invited the agent to the conference call). Deterministic AI provides guardrails so that once an agent ingests a company’s sales materials, it must recite that information without deviation. More than that, Mindy is trained to say she doesn’t know the answer
After a year of operation, 1Mind is used by more than 30 companies, including HubSpot, LinkedIn, and New Relic, to propose and close deals. Carlow said all of the company’s designated customers have annual contracts rather than “experimental” budgets, with “average contracts in six figures.”
The company also uses the bot for internal sales calls. But Carlow even lost his father. She created an avatar of herself, Amanda, and took it to a VC pitch.
During Battery Ventures’ due diligence, “We used this to go through the data room and ask a lot of questions about case studies and things like that,” Battery partner Neeraj Agrawal told TechCrunch about Avatar Amanda. A data room refers to a stack of data that startups share with VCs about their companies.
“Conversation design is very nuanced, including what case studies to share and when,” he said. The VC also determined that customers were having long back-and-forth conversations, an indication that they could forget they were talking to an AI.
The avatar is still accessible through Mr. Carlow’s LinkedIn page, and the public can interact with it. In addition to answering questions about 1Mind’s products, we can also answer questions in other areas, such as Carlow’s perspective as a woman in the technology industry. However, when you chat, it will always try to direct the conversation towards 1Mind, just like human Carlows.
Eventually, Carlow says 1Mind and other agency sales startups will replace high-end account executive sales jobs. Or at least radically rethink it.
“We haven’t gotten to the point where we’re completely replacing AE. We’re replacing websites. We’re replacing sales engineers and customer success. [AE/customer] “Relationships are still happening, and I think over time a lot of what AEs are doing now will go away,” she says.
She believes this is primarily a trust issue at this point. Agentic technology is so new that buyers looking to sign large corporate deals aren’t ready to close without a human.
Interestingly, once trust is built, she will start thinking about agency buyers (and has already started building that trust). Transactions between agents do not involve human avatars, but instead involve the transfer of information and requirements.
Meanwhile, 1Mind is still hiring people, with 44 people, including in sales, and 71 job openings, including account executives.
1Mind said the round included participation from Primary Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Operator Collective, Harmonic Growth Partners, Success Venture Partners, and angels from Monday.com, ZoomInfo, Databricks, Box, Gong, Braze, and Verkada.
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