While AI agents powered by large language models are a relatively recent development, one of the sectors where they've quickly gained traction is sales. 1mind, a company co-founded by Amanda Kahlow, has been quietly rolling out its sales agent, Mindy, for nearly a year now.
On Monday, the company revealed it had secured $30 million in Series A funding, with Battery Ventures leading the round. According to 1mind, this brings their total funding to $40 million.
Kahlow is a recognized figure in the sales and marketing technology space, having founded and previously served as CEO of 6sense. That company, launched in 2013, offered a lead-generation platform that monitored signals from social media and other sources to pinpoint prospective clients. She departed in 2020.
Although the market for sales agents is already saturated, 1mind and its agent Mindy are taking a different approach than most, who focus on sending emails and making unsolicited calls—a space where even her former company, 6sense, is active.
“I’m not competing in outbound,” Kahlow told TechCrunch. Mindy is designed to manage inbound sales, even handling the process through to closing deals, Kahlow explained. The agent is meant to enhance self-service websites and, for larger enterprise transactions, can substitute for a sales engineer during calls. It can also serve as an onboarding expert for new clients.
“Our aim is to authentically mirror the human experience throughout the go-to-market process when there’s buyer intent—whether they’re visiting your website or joining a Zoom call. Mindy can join in and act as the sales engineer,” Kahlow said, referring to Mindy as if she were a person.
Kahlow even refers to her AI agents as “superhumans,” though they are neither human nor do they have any extraordinary abilities like those in comic books.
Each agent can be trained to grasp a comprehensive knowledge base, covering all of a company’s offerings, technical specifications, and competitive landscape.
The startup employs a combination of large language models, such as those from OpenAI and Google Gemini, but both Kahlow and Mindy noted that the agent reduces hallucinations by relying on deterministic AI. This approach ensures that after the agent processes company sales materials, it sticks to that information. If Mindy doesn’t know something, she’s programmed to admit it.
After a year in operation, 1mind’s technology is now used by over 30 organizations—including HubSpot, LinkedIn, and New Relic—to pitch and finalize deals. Kahlow noted that all of their named clients have annual agreements, not just pilot budgets, and that the “average contract is six figures.”
1Mind AI agent Mindy
Image Credits:1Mind
The company also utilizes the bot internally for its own sales calls. Kahlow has taken things a step further by creating a digital avatar of herself, Amanda, which she brought along to her meetings with venture capitalists.
During Battery Ventures’ evaluation process, “we used it to navigate the data room and ask numerous questions about things like case studies,” Battery partner Neeraj Agrawal told TechCrunch regarding the Amanda avatar. The data room is where startups share detailed information with investors.
“The way conversations are structured is quite sophisticated, such as which case studies are shared and at what time,” he said. The VC also observed that customers were engaging in lengthy dialogues, to the point where they seemed to forget they were interacting with an AI.
That avatar remains available on Kahlow’s LinkedIn profile, where anyone can interact with it. It can respond to questions about 1mind’s offerings as well as topics like Kahlow’s experiences as a woman in technology. However, after interacting with it, you’ll notice it—much like Kahlow herself—tends to steer the conversation back to 1mind.
Looking ahead, Kahlow predicts that 1mind and similar agent-driven sales startups will eventually take over higher-level account executive roles—or at least transform them significantly.
“We haven’t reached the point where we’re fully replacing AEs yet. We’re replacing the website, the sales engineer, and customer success, but the [AE/customer] relationship is still there,” she said. “Over time, I believe much of what AEs currently do will disappear.”
She thinks this is mainly a matter of trust for now. Since agentic technology is so new, buyers making major enterprise purchases aren’t ready to proceed without human involvement.
Interestingly, Kahlow anticipates—and is already preparing for—a future where agentic buyers emerge. In these agent-to-agent transactions, there won’t be human avatars involved; instead, information and requirements will be exchanged directly.
For now, 1mind still has a human workforce: 44 employees, including sales staff, and 71 open positions, some of which are for account executives.
The funding round also saw participation from Primary Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Operator Collective, Harmonic Growth Partners, Success Venture Partners, and angel investors from companies like Monday.com, ZoomInfo, Databricks, Box, Gong, Braze, and Verkada, according to 1mind.
