🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Momentum

✍️ Notes from the Editors

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CRMs have long enabled sales teams across the world to sell their wares. But AI can be the answer to supercharge those same teams—Momentum is looking to easily bring those data-driven insights to sales professionals.

On another note: there may be some incredible Unicorner events coming to LA & SF Tech Week… details soon. 🚀

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Turn customer conversations into valuable GTM data

Momentum is a business intelligence platform that gives sales teams a platform that transforms customer calls and communications into insights. Momentum integrates with video conferencing and email software through a plugin to ingest customer calls and emails. It leverages this data using AI to extract actionable intelligence, automatically sharing it with team members through Slack and updating CRMs and systems like Salesforce. Momentum leverages data and meets teams with the tools they already use, including Slack, Salesforce, Google Meet, Zoom, Gong, Clari, and more. For example, it will automatically capture call notes, sync insights with CRMs, automate follow-ups, share data across teams, capture past call data, maintain deal rooms as “sources of truth”, and more.

🔗 Check it out: momentum.io

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💰 Business Model

Momentum sells access to its platform through a multi-tiered SaaS model. Momentum’s starter plan costs $29 per user per month and gives teams the ability to generate AI-powered call summaries, auto-save notes to Salesforce, and build sales workflow automation. Larger teams can opt for the business plan, which is $69 per user per month and gives additional access to a CRM autopilot tool, data sharing across GTM teams (Momentum’s AI Signals product), automating follow-up emails after calls (the spotless emails product), automatically adding contacts to CRMs, a chatbot for deal questions, and more advanced automation. The transformation plan costs $99 per user per month and enables more advanced AI automation features, unlimited AI signals, increased chatbot capabilities, deal management boards, premium support, and more.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised $13 million Series A, led by FirstMark

• According to Momentum, increases productivity by 30% for sales teams

• Grew annual recurring revenue by over 400% in 2023

• Achieved 165% net dollar retention

👫 Founders

• Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, CEO: Currently Member @ South Park Commons; Previously CTO @ Whyline, Co-Founder and CTO @ Blameless, Principal Engineer @ Mulesoft, Director of Engineering @ Sauce Labs, Lead Quality Engineer @ NEORIS, Test Automation Engineer @ RCOM, Information Systems Engineering @ Universidad Tecnológica Nacional

• Ashley Wilson, COO: Currently Member @ Pavilion and Operators Guild, Alumnus @ South Park Commons; Previously Founder & Head of Brand @ Olivine Marketing, Marketing Consultant @ Applitools, Advisor @ Blameless, Interim Head of Content @ Perfecto, Head of Marketing @ Sauce Labs, Journalism and English @ Indiana University Bloomington

• Moiz Virani, CTO: Previously Founding Engineer @ Blameless, Software Engineer @ Sauce Labs, Software Development Engineer @ Amazon, Development Engineer @ Imaginea, Systems Engineer @ Infosys, CS Master’s @ The University of Kansas, CS @ Osmania University

🔮 Our Analysis

Sales is integral to businesses: without sales teams, most companies can’t keep the lights on, and that’s why companies look for every opportunity to give their sales teams superpowers. Despite this importance, however, many sales teams work with limited visibility into the data behind their work—a phenomenon undercutting the performance of sales teams and their revenue. The majority of sales teams are still using legacy technology, manually updating boards, and are unsure of deal statuses. Momentum modernizes sales teams, making them more efficient by building data pipelines and giving them the insights they need to streamline their work and spend more time on sales rather than management.

Momentum integrates directly with the tools that teams already use—a strategy that perfectly complements its ethos of streamlining workflows and saving time. By meeting teams where they are, Momentum automates work and allows teams to focus on sales, rather than adding yet another CRM to keep up-to-date or another dashboard to monitor. For example, Momentum’s integration with Slack means that team members can continue to use the same tool for receiving insights but with AI-generated ones rather than via messages from team members. This emphasis on seamless integrations not only makes Momentum easier to use but ultimately drives productivity by allowing sales teams to operate more efficiently and spend less effort on managing their tools.

Momentum is heavily built on top of AI, from workflow automation to insight extraction. With the capabilities of AI technology rapidly improving, Momentum’s capacity to generate insights stands to only improve, thereby increasing its value proposition for its users. Furthermore, with AI making software development easier, technical moats for software companies are getting leveled very quickly, as the price of building great software is decreasing. This means we’re trending to a future in which distribution is going to be one of the massive remaining moats for software companies—and sales is the key to distributing software better than your competitors. With an increasing emphasis on distribution and sales, Momentum is building in a rapidly growing market where there’s set to be an explosion in demand for quicker, more efficient sales teams.

📚 Further reading

• Momentum, an AI-powered customer intelligence startup, just raised $13 million from FirstMark Capital using this 18-slide pitch deck [Business Insider]

• Momentum raises $13M to enhance AI-driven customer intelligence platform [SiliconANGLE]

Written by Rohan Desai

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