Seattle startup Clarify lands $15M to take on Salesforce with AI-native ‘autonomous CRM'
Clarify co-founders, from left: Austin Hay, Patrick Thompson, and Ondrej Hrebicek. (Clarify Photo)
Sales teams should spend more time closing deals — and less time entering data.
That's the pitch from Clarify, a Seattle startup founded last year that just raised $15 million to grow its AI-powered CRM software platform designed to automate busy work.
Instead of relying on sales reps to manually log interactions, Clarify connects to email, calendar, and call data, and uses AI to summarize meetings, suggest field updates, track pipelines, and prep for customer calls.
Clarify faces stiff competition from giants such as Salesforce and Hubspot, as well as newer CRM startups. Other Seattle startups such as Highspot and Outreach also tackle sales automation and enablement.
But CEO Patrick Thompson said many platforms 'bolt on' on AI features, while Clarify was built with AI at the core.
'We've spent a lot of time rethinking what the core workflows look like from the ground up with ambient AI,' he said.
Clarify is initially targeting early stage startups and venture investors.
'Most of the people coming to us are choosing to go with something that's a little bit more modern, easy to use, and effectively AI-native,' Thompson said.
(Clarify Image)
The company has onboarded hundreds of teams into a pilot program since launching last year and recently opened up its platform publicly. It did not disclose revenue metrics.
'The active usage numbers are doing very, very well,' Thompson said.
Thompson previously co-founded Iteratively, a data tooling startup acquired by Amplitude in 2021. He said the lessons from that company helped inform Clarify's product approach.
Thompson co-founded Clarify alongside Ondrej Hrebicek, former CTO of Iteratively, and Austin Hay, a former Iteratively customer.
'We really want to build a generational company,' Thompson said. 'We have all the makings of that already. We have a great team and great investors, and we're building a great product.'
USVP and Gradient led the Series A round, with participation from Madrona, Recall, Ascend, Essence, New Normal Fund, and Fika.
Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona, said Clarify is 'at the vanguard of the autonomous GTM movement.'
Clarity has raised $22 million to date and employs 24 people.
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The company's business is dependent on the Korean market—compared with blue-chip stalwarts like Samsung and Hyundai whose fortunes are determined by global exports—which faces a deepening economic slump. The country's GDP contracted by 0.2% in the first quarter amid the threat of a global trade war, weak consumer spending and months of political turmoil. In 2024 the company narrowed its net loss to 161.9 billion won ($119.4 million) from 1.82 trillion won the previous year, on a 4% uptick in revenue to 7.87 trillion won. The alliance with OpenAI could yield as much as double-digit sales growth within two years, according to Kakao as it transforms itself into a company where AI is at the core of its operations and services. One-Stop Shop The Korean internet giant offers everything from taxi-hailing to online banking. Percentages have been rounded. Source: Kakao Chung will need to act fast to hard-bake the fast-evolving tech into Kakao's businesses, which run the gamut of everyday activities, from messaging and online banking to music streaming and taxi-hailing, to gain an edge on its chief rival Naver, South Korea's biggest internet company by revenue (2024: 10.73 trillion won). The Seongnam-based firm is widely seen as being a step ahead of Kakao in the AI race with its large language model (LLM) HyperClova X, launched in 2023 and tailored for the Korean language and culture. Also closing in is a fast-growing crop of local AI native startups. 'The AI agent will automatically do the work for you and life will be so much better even without knowing what AI is.' Already Chung has begun laying the foundation. In mid-June, the company announced a 600-billion-won investment to build a 92,000-square-meter AI data center in Namyangju city, about 25 kilometers from Seoul. 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'In this process, we expect that Kakao will be able to secure sustainable growth and level up its corporate value through its collaboration with OpenAI.' A Kakao Friends store selling character merchandise such as Ryan (the lion) and the radish-in-rabbit clothing Muzi. Getty Images In a dry run with OpenAI's tech in early May, Kakao launched a new standalone messaging app called Kanana for closed beta testing that features AI agents Kana and Nana. Powered by OpenAI's GPT and its own small language model (SLM), it can assist users in personal and group chats by answering questions, summarizing group conversations, setting meeting times for events and sharing updates. Kakao declined to say how much it has spent but discloses that some 400 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, are working on AI projects. 'For everyday-use cases, we don't need to [invest in] a large language model,' says Chung, as that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to develop. Besides being cheaper to train and run, SLMs are safer to use as they're less likely to provide incorrect answers to user queries, known as hallucinations, while also being more secure, she adds. It doesn't require a network connection to a cloud, which is vulnerable to server breaches. Kakao will use its SLM to perform simple tasks, while relying on OpenAI's powerful LLM to manage more complex, multistep and linked applications across Kakao's ecosystem, says Chung. It's the same strategy used by Apple: simple queries are answered by Siri, powered by Apple's in-house Apple Intelligence LLM, and more complex questions are directed to ChatGPT. 'Everyone was defaulting to GPUs for AI, but does it make sense to use the most expensive chips for small inference tasks?' explains Chung. A taxi operated by Korea Mobility. © 2021 Bloomberg Finance LP The company expects to complete Kanana's closed beta testing in November, around the same time that it plans to launch the OpenAI-Kakao AI agent. 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In June, a joint venture between its internet banking arm Kakao Bank and Thai financial group SCBX, which controls Siam Commercial Bank, received approval from the Thai government to establish a virtual bank in Thailand, making it the first Korean bank to operate in the country in 25 years. Earlier this year Kakao Entertainment announced the global launch of its fan-community app Berriz as Kakao Healthcare forged a partnership with Seoul-based elderly-care startup Caring and expanded into Japan. Flat Line Kakao's quarterly revenue has seen little movement in the past two years. Source: Kakao K akao's sales started to lose steam after peaking at 2 trillion won in the third quarter of 2023. With the company being under pressure to boost revenue and earnings, founder Kim Beom-su embarked on an aggressive expansion of its entertainment portfolio. Kim, who has a 24% stake in Kakao and a net worth of $5.1 billion, made the fateful call to get into a bidding war for K-pop agency SM Entertainment with Korean billionaire Bang Si-hyuk's Hybe, manager of boy band sensation BTS. While Kakao was ultimately successful, snatching a 35% stake in SM for 1.3 trillion won in March 2023, prosecutors alleged that Kim, long-hailed as an internet pioneer, had manipulated SM's stock price to ward off Hybe. Kim, who denied any wrongdoing, was arrested in July 2024 and is currently out on bail awaiting trial. In a statement to Kakao employees at the time, he said: 'The allegations are not true. I have never instructed or condoned any illegal acts.' A crisis 'can be an opportunity for renewal.' During the takeover battle for SM, Chung was running venture capital arm Kakao Ventures and also had a board seat at Kakao. She had made a name for herself as a VC investor with a portfolio that produced four unicorns. To steady the ship, Kakao's board enlisted Chung as CEO last year. 'I saw that period as a turning point for Kakao,' she recalls, adding that a crisis 'can be an opportunity for renewal.' Chung's forward-looking approach was honed over a 25-year career that has included roles at Boston Consulting Group, eBay and Kakao rival Naver. Chung studied French literature at Yonsei University in Seoul (not because she particularly liked French lit, she says, but because back then it was the subject du jour among brainy female students), followed by a master's degree in marketing from the same college and an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. Photo by Jaehyun Kim for Forbes Asia In 2014, she joined Kakao Ventures as a partner, becoming its CEO four years later. Her decade-long stint at the VC arm taught her how to deploy 'my imagination with curiosity,' she says. 'For example, the market for most early-stage investments wasn't there yet, so I needed to imagine it.' 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OpenAI is also restricted in its use of personal data collected from Kanana agents, per a government review requested by Kakao over concerns about sharing personal information such as bank account and credit card details. Chat data must be stored in a database controlled by Kakao and can't be used by OpenAI for commercial purposes, the Personal Information Protection Commission ruled. Kakao Pay is accepted at stores throughout South Korea. © 2021 Bloomberg Finance LP For now, a campaign promise by South Korea's new president Lee Jae-myung to invest 100 trillion won in AI and introduce measures to support the country's internet giants has led Kakao's previously moribund shares to surge over 85% in the past two months. Investors also piled in over a proposed law that would allow companies in South Korea to issue won stablecoins, with Kakao's listed payments platform Kakao Pay seen as one of the main beneficiaries. Kakao Pay shares rocketed before correcting sharply recently after regulators highlighted the risks associated with stablecoins. Chung's shown the stamina and smarts to meet such challenges and has a secret weapon up her sleeve: imagination. 'It will work very well,' she says. 'Especially when new eras come.' More From Forbes Forbes Korea's Kakao Teams Up With OpenAI To Develop AI Products By Zinnia Lee Forbes Korean Webtoon Publisher Kakao On The Industry's Anti-Piracy Crusade By Rob Salkowitz Forbes South Korea's AI Chip Champion Is Poised To Carve Out Global Niche By John Kang
