For decades, the world of CRM has been stuck in a rut. Sales teams were hired, cultures set, processes designed, and then forced into a standard CRM system. Despite all our efforts to modernize go-to-market (GTM) teams, we’ve failed to change CRM due to legacy technology, which has slowed down the evolution of sales process and culture.
Now, twenty-five years after the last CRM revolution, everything is changing, and it’s happening all at once. Customers are researching and buying in entirely new ways, relationships are long-term and built differently, and products are increasingly becoming services. All of this is unfolding just as AI is unlocking massive opportunities across sales, marketing, and the entire customer journey. A new revolution in GTM teams is finally not only possible but absolutely necessary to build the successful cultures, processes, and tools for the next 25 years.
This revolution is here, and it will be led by GTM builders. Companies will now continuously build, customize, and iterate on their GTM processes, tooling, and culture, much like they build and iterate on products to fit their target customers. Instead of fragmented teams separately chasing demand generation, qualified sales opportunities, new customers, and expansion orders, there will be one unified team. These GTM builders will leverage AI at every step to enable, measure, and improve the customer journey. The unified GTM team will feature roles with much wider responsibilities, empowering territory managers to customize their own GTM process to fit the unique needs of their specific customers and products.
While the arrival of cloud enabled the first CRM disruption, AI is not only enabling this current disruption but also making it a fundamental requirement, given how significantly it has altered customer behavior. The world’s largest B2B software market, CRM, is currently dominated by legacy players built for a world of manual inputs and rigid workflows. It was essentially data storage, reporting, and workflow management. Simply layering AI on top of these legacy systems won’t empower GTM builders to meet modern GTM requirements. To truly unleash AI’s potential, a new underlying architecture is absolutely necessary.
This is precisely why I am so excited to lead Attio’s Series B and am honored to join their board as they define the next 25 years of CRM. Nicolas Sharp, founder and CEO of Attio, along with co-founder Alexander Christie, founder and CTO, are building the AI-native CRM specifically designed to meet the needs of today’s companies as they transform into the companies of the future. This is a product that is fully programmable, endlessly extensible, and designed for humans and AI to work seamlessly side-by-side.
Attio Founders Nicolas Sharp and Alexander Christie
Prior to my time at GV, I spent the majority of my career leading GTM functions at high-growth companies. I’ve personally experienced the pain of a fragmented go-to-market stack that invariably slows down fast-moving teams and forces them to adapt their processes to the software, instead of the other way around. The builders were simply constrained. I first cautiously reached out to Nick and Alex in 2024 because I had seen similar efforts try and fail before. We met in London, and immediately, Attio felt like the answer I had wished for all along. I quickly understood:
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Attio has the founder-led team and culture to successfully revolutionize a massive market.
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Their first-principles approach has enabled them to create an entirely new architecture, perfectly suited to the AI era, enabling builders to customize and iterate their GTM motion as markets continue to mature in this new age.
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Attio is poised to lead over the long run. Their vision starts with an AI-native architecture and the best product today, but they will guide GTM builders through decades of rapid evolution.
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Customers absolutely love Attio. They are able to put all of their energy into finding and serving customers by building the perfect AI-native GTM for their specific needs. They are “building and selling," a stark contrast to the past 25 years, which felt like endless “implementations” of the status quo.
If you have lived in my world, I’m confident you will also come to love Attio. The magic begins with its AI-native architecture, built from the ground up to provide the deep, rich context that AI needs to deliver true value. Attio automatically ingests and enriches data, significantly reducing the need for manual data entry and provides a complete picture of every customer and every interaction. It’s not about linked objects; it’s about fluid insight and action.
It only took me minutes to reach my first “aha moment.” Simply by connecting my calendar and email, Attio delivered honest, surprising, and actionable insights that I hadn’t even considered among my own contacts. Through a fast, self-serve trial, teams and even individuals can experiment alongside their existing CRM stack and enjoy easy, automated migration after they experience what AI-native GTM is all about.
As customers discover Attio, they recommend it so frequently that the company has achieved 4x year-on-year growth at significant ARR. They currently serve thousands of customers who are utilizing the product at the heart of their revenue machines and GTM strategy.
It’s no surprise that Attio itself operates with an AI-native philosophy. The company’s core value is “context over control,” a principle that empowers every employee to be a decision-maker. By automating manual work, Attio’s culture allows its own team to dedicate more time to high-impact work and critical decision-making. I believe this approach is essential for building and scaling in the AI era and is exactly how GTM builders should also operate.
I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to partner with Nicolas and Alex. They have built an incredible product and cultivated a passionate team. I’m looking forward to working with them to accelerate their vision, as they plan to use this new funding to scale their engineering team, expand their global go-to-market efforts, and accelerate the development of the AI primitives that will truly reinvent CRM for decades to come. We’re incredibly excited to be on this journey with them as they build the next foundation of CRM.