Founders: Christopher O’Donnell & Michael Pici
Founding: 2023
Mission: Reimagining CRM for the AI Age
Employees: 5 & 50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4M raised
Investors: Stage 2, Sequoia Capital, Pillar VC, Conviction, 20 Sales & Inspired Capital
Key Local Customers:
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the $4M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Day.ai is building an AI native CRM platform for the next generation of startups and businesses. This team is using AI to bring the voice of the customer into the center of growing businesses, syncing conversations and contacts into a new type of first principles, insights driven CRM platform.
Founded in 2023 by a deeply experienced team led by former HubSpot executives Christopher O’Donnell & Michael Pici, the Day.ai team has lived in the CRM space for years. They’ve recognized this moment gives them a unique opportunity to create something brand new in a familiar space.
Christopher & Michael both joined HubSpot in its pre-IPO days. Christopher came to the company via the Performable acquisition – the training ground of David Cancel, Elias Torres, Andrew Bialecki & others. He helped re-write HubSpot’s entire product ahead of the HubSpot3 product launch. Michael was one of the first revenue leaders working on their emergent sales software acceleration tools and the foundational products which later became HubSpot CRM. Christopher later became HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer and Michael led new product & revenue expansion efforts as an executive here in the U.S. and Europe. Day.ai’s Founding Engineer, Erik Munson, was also an early member of the HubSpot team.
Building HubSpot into a winner was a formative experience where Christopher & Michael learned the critical skill of staying close to their customers. HubSpot had a monthly Voice of the Customer meeting to better understand “the big rocks” they needed to move to help customers succeed. The funny thing? A lot of the useful insights brought into those meetings lived outside of the core CRM – support tickets, call logs, etc.
The CRM market is massive. It’s over $75B today and expected to grow to $225B+ over the next decade (src). Historically, building a relationship management platform for your customer base sounds a lot like an engineering project. You create database objects related to primary keys. When you run a report and it doesn’t come out quite right, you’ll need to organize the underlying database in a different way. Having a good relationship with your customers is seemingly…unrelated to all of those things.
As companies grow, there’s an interesting paradox where it becomes harder to stay connected to your customers, even though staying close to your customers is what enables you to grow fast! If companies really looked at themselves in the mirror, they might find their CRM doesn’t actually know very much about their customers.
Imagine a sales rep sitting down with their manager to walk through a pipeline review. Using Day.ai the rep can pull out clips like “what are my prospects most excited about?” and “what are the biggest objections?” exported into a beautiful document to have a much more impactful business conversation.
Day.ai is using AI to bring the voice of the customer into every interaction, without doing any of the hard prep work. They’re building a connected system which stays close to customers so you can focus on actionable insights to help drive your business forward. No database management skills necessary!
Christopher, Michael & team are using modern AI natural language & database tools to perform better core CRM activities…with a first principles approach in the way they were always meant to be leveraged. Their application is bringing together three distinct categories – a relationship focused Meeting Assistant, Pipeline reporting that automatically organizes CRM data, and Pages which act as a customer-centric knowledge base.
The front end sits on top of a powerful vector database to allow for better search and retrieval from large datasets. Instead of trying to shoehorn customer data into legacy relational databases, Day.ai can ingest raw conversational data and automatically format it across an infinite graph to help map conceptual relationships.
Their initial product works on Google Suite and Zoom, ideal for startups, building toward a fully integrated system that works perfectly before supporting additional platforms. As they prove out customer use cases and bring this promise to reality with early customers, they will continue to unlock access toward general availability.
After their recent public launch, they already have a significant number of companies on the platform actively using their product with a waitlist in the thousands. Their ideal customer is startup founders, small business owners, and early stage revenue leaders who don’t want to update CRM, but want access to hyper specific slices of customer data with the simple ask of a question. The goal for the rest of 2024? Build.
Christopher & Michael admire “compound” startups like Rippling who put their heads down and brought a fully packaged solution to market. They too are working on three distinct product categories and integrating them into a different, tightly bound CRM experience.
Everyone on the current team lives in or has previously lived in Boston and they hope to keep growing locally in the coming quarters! Here to support that goal!
Operators to Know:
- Erik Munson, Founding Engineer
- Gwendolyn Reynolds, Head of AI & Data Science
- Erin Laio, Operations Lead
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Day.ai team if I missed any up & coming operators internally.
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What is the ideal target customer and how might that shift over the next 12-18 months?
- What key milestones are the team organizing around? How are you making progress toward them?
- What is the biggest competitive differentiator of the Day.ai offering relative to existing options?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Day.ai you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more GTM teams into the AI age. All pipeline & product feedback enthusiasts applaud your efforts. See you around town!