The data scientists who built machine learning community Kaggle just raised $38.5 million to shake up sales intelligence with context-driven AI. Sumble emerged from stealth Wednesday with backing from Coatue and Canaan Partners, claiming it can surface deeper company insights than traditional prospecting tools by connecting scattered web data through knowledge graphs.
The machine learning heavyweights behind Kaggle are betting they can out-AI the sales intelligence giants. Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner just emerged from stealth with Sumble, raising $38.5 million to bring what they call "contextual intelligence" to the crowded world of sales prospecting.
The funding comes in two tranches - Coatue led an $8.5 million seed round, while Canaan Partners headed up a $30 million Series A. AIX Ventures, Square Peg, Bloomberg Beta, and heavyweight angels including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also joined the round.
What makes this interesting isn't just the Kaggle pedigree. It's how quickly enterprise customers are adopting the platform. Since launching in April 2024, Sumble has signed 17 enterprise clients including Snowflake, Figma, Wiz, Vercel, and Elastic. The company declined to share revenue figures, but sources familiar with the matter tell us revenue jumped 550% year-over-year.
"What tends to happen is, we go viral inside a company," Goldbloom told TechCrunch. "We'll go from 1 to 500 monthly active users in a company over six months. It spreads through Slack channels, then teams, then offices."
The viral growth story reflects what Sumble is trying to solve - sales teams drowning in data but starving for context. Traditional sales intelligence platforms like ZoomInfo and Apollo.io excel at contact discovery and basic company information. But Sumble claims its knowledge graph approach delivers deeper insights by connecting dots across social media, job boards, regulatory filings, and company websites.
The platform uses large language models to process this scattered data and surface what Goldbloom calls "technographic intelligence" - which tools companies use in specific departments, ongoing projects, organizational changes, and crucially, technology adoption signals that indicate buying intent.
"Sales teams need more than data; they want context," Goldbloom explained. The knowledge graph covers 2.6 million companies globally, and about 30% of users convert to paid Pro subscriptions that offer workflow integrations and prospect alerts.
