Inside the Round: Attio

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Welcome to Feed The AI’s Inside the Round!

Discover the measurable impacts of AI agents for customer support

How Did Papaya Slash Support Costs Without Adding Headcount?

When Papaya saw support tickets surge, they faced a tough choice: hire more agents or risk slower service. Instead, they found a third option—one that scaled their support without scaling their team.

The secret? An AI-powered support agent from Maven AGI that started resolving customer inquiries on day one.

With Maven AGI , Papaya now handles 90% of inquiries automatically - cutting costs in half while improving response times and customer satisfaction. No more rigid decision trees. No more endless manual upkeep. Just fast, accurate answers at scale.

The best part? Their human team is free to focus on the complex, high-value issues that matter most.

👉 Curious how they did it? Read the full case study to learn how Papaya transformed their customer support

You saw the funding headline. You maybe even hit “like” on LinkedIn. But do you actually know what’s under the hood?

Welcome to Inside the Round, where we peel back the hype, follow the money trail, and show you the signals hiding in plain sight.

Let’s dive in!

The Deal:

Attio , a startup reimagining CRM for the AI era, just raised $52 million in a Series B round.

• Lead Investor: GV (Google Ventures)

• Other Backers: Redpoint Ventures, Balderton Capital, Point Nine, 01A

• Total Raised: $116 million

This raise is all about speeding up their mission to give GTM teams a programmable, AI-native CRM.

What Do They Actually Do?

Attio wants to be the platform that GTM teams build on, not just use.

• It combines real-time data ingestion, programmable APIs, and AI agents into a flexible CRM workspace.

• Teams aren't just updating the CRM (which most GTM teams hate doing). They're creating custom workflows, spinning up tooling, and extending the platform without waiting on a vendor roadmap.

• The core idea is this: your CRM should adapt to your go-to-market motion, not the other way around.

Think of it like a GTM operating system that RevOps teams, GTM engineers, and founders can shape as needed.

The Founders

• Nicolas Sharp , who serves as CEO and co‑founder of Attio

• Alexander Christie , CTO and co‑founder

Why Now?

GTM execution is changing fast.

• AI is automating manual tasks across sales and marketing.

• GTM teams are becoming more technical.

• Legacy CRMs are too slow, rigid, and complex. Seriously no one likes their CRM.
  Attio is all in on programmable CRM, betting that forward-thinking teams want tools that evolve with them.

Competitive Context

Attio sits at the intersection of legacy CRM and modern GTM tools. This is both a blessing and a curse. Attio is not just competing with CRMs. It’s also part of a broader shift toward modular, programmable tools for go-to-market teams (ex: the rise of the GTM engineer )

Incumbents:

• Salesforce

• HubSpot

Modern challengers:

• Folk

• Clay (who just raised $100m )

• Scratchpad

• Retool (in adjacent internal tooling space)

Mini SWOT Analysis

Strengths

• Clear positioning for technical GTM buyers

• Rapid adoption with 5,000 paying customers

• Strong investor backing

• Deep integration of AI throughout the product

Weaknesses

• Competing in a very crowded market and one where companies are hesitant to switch

• May be too technical for less-savvy teams

• Less brand awareness compared to incumbents

Opportunities

• Serve RevOps and GTM engineering communities

• Become the go-to programmable CRM layer

• Expand to marketplaces and third-party builders

Threats

• Salesforce launching AI-native functionality

• GTM stack consolidation from larger vendors

• Execution risk if primitives are too hard to use

What Could Kill This Company?

• Losing focus by trying to serve both technical and non-technical users

• Struggling to break into larger enterprises locked into multi year contracts with Salesforce and HubSpot

• Failing to make their primitives accessible for teams without dev resources

Final Takeaway

Attio is not trying to be the next CRM. It wants to be the platform that modern GTM teams build their operations on.

This $52 million round signals investor conviction that a programmable, AI-native approach is not just a nice-to-have, it’s the future.

If they execute, Attio could become to RevOps what Retool became to internal apps.

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See you in the next episode.

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