Bounti, which specialises in autonomous AI products, has emerged out of stealth and raised $16 million in seed funding. The round was led by Google Ventures (recently backed Cribl) with participation from Floodgate, Bloomberg Beta, Haystack, Octave Ventures, and MS&AD.
Additionally, the company announced that Silicon Valley veteran Lew Cirne, founder of New Relic, acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG for $6.5 billion in November 2023, is its first independent board member.
Google Ventures, leaders of the round, were impressed by Bounti’s AI-powered vision: “We spent several years getting to know the Bounti founding team, and Ashar Rizqi and Matt Cooley truly stood out. Their blend of profound technical expertise and go-to-market leadership is unmatched,” said Sangeen Zeb, General Partner at Google Ventures. “We’ve been impressed by Bounti’s rapid development of a strong enterprise customer pipeline and the delivery of tangible value at the application layer. We share Bounti’s vision that AI will transform knowledge work as we know it, and we’re excited to support the team as they bring real AI-driven value to go-to-market teams.”
Autonomous AI for sales
Founded by Matt Cooley and fellow Silicon Valley veteran Ashar Rizqi in California, Bounti has launched the world’s first full-stack, full-funnel agentic AI teammate platform, designed to enhance the efficiency and productivity of sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
The company frees sales teams from repetitive repetitive tasks and boosts productivity tasks, enabling more personalised and effective customer interactions.
Unlike traditional AI tools, Bounti’s first teammate, specialising in prospecting, delivers capabilities that automate research and personalisation work at blazing speed and large scale. This significantly reduces the time spent on mundane tasks and allows sales teams to focus on the customer.
“We’re going to fix something that is broken about sales and customer engagement today,” said Matt Cooley, Bounti co-founder. The explosion of AI products has eroded personalisation and human connection, and if you’re paying attention, you can tell that customers are exhausted with outreach that doesn’t connect to their needs.
“Turning human-led services into AI-augmented software is the future of how businesses can use AI effectively,” added Ashar Rizqi, Bounti co-founder. “We are far away from AGI, and the problems in using AI to make sales autonomous are sophisticated and require deep expertise that comes from real, trained humans. With a Bounti engagement, you get paired with cutting-edge software and a highly trained professional in the latest sales methodologies to accelerate your revenue goals – focusing on outcomes and not just software usage. We will use our funding to invest aggressively in expanding capabilities across both the software platform and human-in-the-loop services component.”
How does Bounti teammate work?
It takes a research-first approach, in which the details of a prospective company drive the outreach. Within ten minutes, you can have 500+ companies thoroughly researched for you, with buyers identified and personalised emails generated.
Unlike others in this segment, the company does not simply automate the mass delivery of emails with a firm belief that humans must be involved. Within 5 minutes the AI teammate researches hundreds of companies for just one sales rep, finding thousands of buyers while keeping information fresh via a streaming LLM architecture. Highly personalised outreach options rooted in up-to-the-minute research are served up to the rep in seconds.
Besides this AI augmentation model, customers can choose to handover the entire prospecting function to the company to run with highly trained sales professionals.
“Bounti is an incredible time saver,” said Bernie Kassar, Bounti customer and founder and CEO of Latitude 39 (former CCO of Xactly). “We couldn’t enable people fast enough or expect our sales team to produce this level of insight in days, let alone minutes. Bounti allows for intelligent conversations to happen much faster by removing the mundane work that bogs everyone down. You only get one chance to make a first impression.”
