Deepening our Partnership with Unify

Our journey with Unify began 5 years ago with a simple email.

Ramzi Ramsey, then a Director at Softbank, sent Jake a note introducing one of the brightest up and comers on his team and asking if he could connect him to a counterpart at Emergence to learn the business from each other. Jake connected that junior investor, Austin Hughes, to Yaz El-Baba on the Emergence team and the rest, as they say, is history.

Yaz and Austin stayed close, even when Austin decided to transition from investing to take an operating role at Ramp. After a few successful years building growth efforts there, Austin caught the startup bug.

With a keen eye for what was missing in the sales software stack, Austin described to us a vision for unifying previously disparate data sources and layering in AI-powered workflows to make smart use of them. He partnered with Connor Heggie as CTO and co-founder, who called on his experience with Scale AI and Helm to turn this concept into reality. Austin and Connor hit the ground running in January of 2023 and have been executing with intense velocity ever since.

Over the years we at Emergence have developed a robust perspective on the opportunity in sales software, having partnered with Salesforce, Salesloft, Chorus, and many others. We believe the next era of SaaS companies will demand software that enables solo GTM leaders to operate like armies of enterprise sellers. This is now possible because AI can handle most of the mundane tasks required of sales teams better than humans can, allowing them to focus on the strategic and creative activities we excel at.

It’s reasonable to ask, as many in the startup community have, how AI products and startups are defensible if they’re all just wrappers around an LLM. At Emergence, when we evaluate an AI-enabled application, we ask ourselves what portion of the “job to be done” could be done by going straight to the LLM. In the case of Unify, the challenge of driving sustainable increases in customer pipeline requires much more than just an LLM.

Indeed, Unify has built a robust data architecture that feeds a variety of AI-enabled actions to help their customers drive more high quality pipeline. These “Plays” are at the heart of the updates Unify is releasing to all customers today. Unify’s been developing these AI automations for months, and the results speak for themselves: the company is driving almost half of their own sales pipeline from their product, and the business is growing at over 40% month over month.

The curve we’re most excited about, however, is the slope of growth Austin and Connor have been on since their journey started. They are incredible sponges, iterating with tremendous velocity. They literally count every day of Unify’s existence, having built many startups worth of product by not letting any of the 618 they’ve been working together go to waste. To name a few: Intent Signals, AI Account Research, AI Email Personalization, Sequencing, Email Deliverability and Infrastructure, Bi-Directional Salesforce and Hubspot Integrations, and the list goes on.

After backing Unify in their founding round in early 2023, we’re excited to double down and lead their Series A, alongside our friends at Thrive, OpenAI, Neo, Abstract, 20Sales, and AltCap.

When we were first partnering with Unify, we made Austin and Connor a fun illustration of “Mt. Sellmore” – putting their faces alongside some of the iconic sales founders we at Emergence have been fortunate to work with over the years. We’re as convinced as ever that they and the entire team at Unify are rapidly earning their place on the mountain.