Why We Invested in Alium: A Better Way to Buy Software
Vendors struggle to get richer market insights; buyers don’t always have access to the right information and peer perspectives on software options. Alium, out of stealth today, offers a better way to access intelligence.

When I was the CRO of Sailthru, I regularly said that I lost more sleep over the deals we never saw versus the ones we competed for and ultimately lost. A recent 6sense whitepaper revealed that 84% of software deals are decided before the vendor even knows about the prospect’s evaluation; some version of that statistic has existed for some time now, and was the instigator of my sleeplessness! Before buyers engage directly with vendors, they engage with one another—their peers—for feedback and input. For vendors, market perception becomes pipeline reality. Said another way, Fortune 500 Prospect X could be ghosting your sales team because peers in the market are still talking about your technical scaling challenges from two years ago.
In an attempt to improve our sales processes and market positioning, I invested tens of thousands of dollars per year on consultants to help us with closed lost research and competitive intelligence. And while those insights were helpful, they did not help us understand what all of our non-prospects were saying about us in the market: Our intelligence was governed by the number of opportunities we had actively worked.
And while vendors struggle to get richer market insight, buyers have their own struggles in running down the right information and peer perspectives. Yes, they can join industry events and Slack channels and use their personal rolodexes to solicit input on buying decisions, but there’s no one-click solution for quickly gathering intelligence.
We believe that both sellers and buyers of software deserve richer intelligence and context as they explore new business partnerships, which is why we are excited to introduce Alium out of stealth mode and to announce its $7M seed round we led alongside Greycroft. Alium combines unbiased interviews from its private buyer network with AI-driven language models to generate insights about how enterprise software performs in real business situations.
Alium interviews technology buyers and facilitates peer-to-peer discussions to help decision markers get access to real use cases and answers to their toughest questions. Alium monetizes these insights by anonymizing and aggregating this information and making it available to vendor customers on an AI-first platform that makes it incredibly straightforward to sort for comments made about their products or those of competitors, as well as to “listen” for relevant opportunities, e.g. a large retailer mentioning plans to invest in a customer data platform. Armed with these insights, vendors are able to identify new prospects, better understand market perception of their brand, and, last but certainly not least, proactively identify potential churn risks.
Jonathan Sherry, Alium's Cofounder and CEO, was previously the Cofounder and COO of CB Insights and his Cofounder Alexandre Testu was an early CB Insights engineer. This dynamic duo has deep domain expertise in the data as a service category, and embarked on their new journey with tremendous conviction about how AI would unlock more scale and robustness for information services. I had the privilege of meeting Jon at a cohort analysis course I taught in NYC back in 2014 and followed his leadership and journey with CB Insights from that point forward; a decade later, I am ecstatic to have the opportunity to be in business together.
Alium boasts a sizable roster of both brand partners (who participate in the buyer interviews) and technology vendor customers (me in my past life—enterprise CROs seeking to level up their market intelligence). Today Alium’s network includes 500+ technology decision makers from Fortune 1000 brands including Walmart, Mondelez, JetBlue, Nike, Best Buy, and L’Oreal, and sells market insights into innovative technology companies. Expert networks such as Tegus and GLG offer searchable transcripts, but their conversations tend to be just-in-time and very transactional based on a very specific question the paying customer had in mind, so more often than not they lack important context and details about the buyer’s broader business environment, etc.
It’s exciting to think about a world where two truths can be held at once: Companies are empowered to make smarter technology decisions through real buyer conversations, and AI intelligence, and software executives can sleep easier at night because they have a stronger command of the market dynamics at play. If you’re a technology buyer ready to make your purchasing decisions easier or a technology seller eager to learn more about the deals or risks you never see, we encourage you to talk to Alium.