Why We Invested in 1mind: The Future of Go-to-Market is AI-led Growth

Today’s “modern” go-to-market motion often feels anything but modern because it is fundamentally broken for both sellers and buyers. Commercial teams struggle to navigate growth and efficiency trade-offs, and buyers invariably feel those trade-off tensions in underwhelming customer experiences. While AI promises transformation, to date it has largely delivered only incrementality. Buyers and sellers are drowning in point solution experiments that don’t materially move the needle. Nobody wins.

Growth commands a premium over profitability even in the tightest market conditions, so SaaS companies are always charging hard at top-line ARR growth, even if that means sacrificing quality and efficiency along the way. Everyone loves to talk about the eye-popping growth of the AI darlings, but we live in a tale of two cities and in the non-AI-native world where top-line ARR growth has been compressed, companies have been forced to pay more attention to their bottom lines, meaning all eyes are on efficiency. Metrics such as “APE” (ARR/FTE) are the talk of the town.

More often than not, getting more efficient means cutting costs. But the reality for sales-led businesses is that 50-80% of their sales and marketing burn is headcount, so when they push to make teams more efficient, it’s usually the buyer who suffers: slower response times, reduced access to answers until they can prove they are fully “qualified,” and so forth. Buyers are consistently underwhelmed and frustrated when evaluating new solutions because the process is so disjointed for them: schedule a meeting with a BDR only to get minimal information while they evaluate you, wait an entire day for an account executive to sync with a solutions consultant on technical questions before circling back, etc. As the old sales adage goes, “time kills all deals,” and many deals are lost before a qualified lead is ever even logged in the system purely on account of the bumpy buyer experience...

Even high-growth or mature sales teams with plenty of resources haven’t delivered much better for their buyers. The larger commercial teams become, the wider the distribution in team performance and quality, thus weakening the efficiency of the overall funnel and rate-limiting growth (while still disappointing the end customer).

The product-led growth (“PLG”) movement proved that it is possible to operate in a leaner capacity while still delighting customers, but “product-led” was the operative part of that equation. We believe that AI-led growth will democratize this potential to every shape, flavor and size of company in a way that benefits buyers and sellers alike. This is why we’re excited to introduce 1mind and announce their $40M in funding following their recent $30M Series A led by Battery Ventures. We were privileged to lead 1mind’s $10M seed round in the spring of 2024, and are excited to double-down with our support as 1mind enters their next chapter of growth.

Today, go-to-market (“GTM”) executives are inundated with pitches for AI point solutions and co-pilots. Siloed tools lack the efficacy of a horizontal solution (i.e. a sales-facing AI would be much more helpful to a prospect if it was also trained on customer support questions, internal knowledge bases, etc.) and broader, more horizontal LLMs don’t offer the level of accuracy CROs require. And at the end of the day, humans are inherently rate-limited in how fast they can read, digest and act on information provided by co-pilots. 1mind deploys human-like AI to GTM teams to augment and ultimately replace full-time employees. As Jacco van der Kooij wrote in a recent Winning by Design research paper, “the best use of AI is not to improve people's performance through co-pilots but to create disproportionate improvement by using AI to optimize the process entirely and replace the seller.” GTM teams are hungry for a consolidated approach purpose-built for them.

We aren’t talking about agents or AI wrappers. 1mind’s superhumans have faces, voices, personalities, knowledge, motivations and a GTM brain. They have their own AI-optimized virtual desktops that allow them to do anything a human can do on their computer, including joining impromptu video calls to give presentations or demos. 1mind promises the power of a salesforce that never sleeps, learns at lightning speed, and evolves continuously.

Amanda Kahlow, 1mind’s founder and CEO, was previously founder and CEO of 6sense, the pioneer of B2B account-based marketing and intent data. After taking some time off following that incredible journey, Amanda sprung back into action when she identified another category-creating opportunity to transform how B2B companies grow, through what she’s coined as AI-led growth, or AiLG. As Amanda regularly says, 6sense was to find buyers and 1mind is to close them. Sachin Bhat, Amanda’s right hand and 1mind’s CTO, is an experienced enterprise technologist and former founder who most recently spent 5 years scaling complex global engineering and data teams at Rippling.

We believe that Amanda’s reputation and reach make her uniquely suited to usher GTM teams into the next (AI-powered) era of growth and that the formidable commercial-technical duo of her and Sachin will build the definitive GTM platform and accelerate AI adoption across all flavors of commercial and customer teams.

Indeed, sales is just the beachhead: 1mind’s vision is to be all-knowing for an organization, with targeted use cases that run the gamut from top of funnel qualification all the way through to ongoing technical support. 1mind will become the brain, face, and voice of commercial and customer organizations. And as 1mind executes its horizontal, end-to-end play, we believe they will be well-positioned to box out other categories of software, including training and enablement software, internal knowledge management tools, demo automation software and more.

No one tells a company’s story better than its customers, and 1mind’s reviews are off the charts. To date the team has successfully partnered with incredible brands such as Hubspot, Nutanix, Owner, Seismic New Relic and Boston Dynamics, and 30% of customers expand to new use cases within 90 days of going live, and several of 1mind’s customers have joined the cap table.

AI-led growth is the future of go-to-market. There will always be things humans will do better than AI, but there are many things AI will consistently do better than humans, and we’re excited to live in a world where that is celebrated and encouraged. As Amanda says, “if you are worried about your AI hallucinating, have you asked yourself whether your sellers hallucinate?”

It's exhilarating to imagine SaaS companies no longer need to think about account prioritization or ticket deflection because AI does the heavy lifting for them, never mind the resulting implications for buyer satisfaction. If you’re a revenue leader committed to true transformation in your go-to-market organization, we encourage you to engage with 1mind’s superhuman (Mindy) today.