A business can be doing quite well and still be the wrong business to spend your life on. Nicolas Sharp and Alex Christie had customers for Fundstack, their CRM for investment teams. The customers wanted more features. So far, so ordinary. But the requests kept diverging, even within the same industry. The product was finding a market; the founders were finding a problem with the product’s underlying shape.
In a café in central London, they considered a larger undertaking: software that companies could mould around the way they actually operated. Christie went back to his desk, put on headphones and worked through Salesforce’s onboarding and API. The investigation did not frighten them off. Sharp later described their state of mind with admirable economy: “I think we had the right amount of naïveté.”
They founded Attio in 2019. General availability would arrive in March 2023. Between those dates lay the part of a company’s history that fits poorly into a celebratory announcement: building, testing, revising and asking people to wait.
The investor changes seats
Sharp’s original encounter with CRM came from the customer’s side of the desk. At Passion Capital, he worked on deal flow and experienced the difficulty of finding and integrating software for the firm. Venture investing depends on relationships, conversations and information that arrives in no especially convenient order. Keeping track of it should have been an ordinary software task. The available tools made it troublesome enough to become a business idea.
He founded Fundstack in 2017. He also discovered how different a startup looks when you are responsible for its daily progress. Within about three months, he recalled, he was embarrassed by some of the advice he had given as an investor. The practical demands of building had rearranged his opinions. There is something cheering about an adviser voluntarily admitting that the view improved after he changed seats.
Investing had been an education, but moving between different companies and markets did not hold his attention in the same way as improving one product every day. That preference matters in the Attio story. The attraction was sustained work on a particular problem. The problem soon outgrew the first company’s narrow remit.
Three years to make a first impression
Fundstack had been shipped quickly. In a 2026 conversation, Sharp explained Attio’s long preparation partly as a response to that earlier experience. Building the first product fast had created problems he did not want to reproduce. Attio required foundations capable of supporting a broader range of businesses, rather than another collection of fixes for a particular customer group.
Those years were not spent entirely away from customers. Early access gave the team a way to test the product while its capabilities were still limited. Bringing in the first users could involve days of custom data imports and manual configuration. Human effort covered the gaps, and the gaps told the engineers what needed attention. The promised convenience for customers had a decidedly inconvenient backstage.
The distinction between a long build and a silent build is useful here. The team shared work in progress, and early users supplied feedback before the public launch. In his account of those early stages, Sharp described a gradual progression: people used the product, continued using it, and eventually agreed to pay. Each step answered a different question.
By December 2022, while still in beta, Attio had passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue. March 2023 brought general availability and the announcement of a $23.5 million Series A. The launch was the point at which a wider audience could enter. It was not the point at which the company began learning.
Founded in London. Built with early users. Opened to everyone in March 2023.
Even the name needed engineering
Before a platform can reshape anybody’s business, somebody has to decide what to call it. Attio’s team had one firm requirement: a .com domain. That led to a shortlist of existing words and conversations with their owners. Some opening prices reached seven figures. The team had raised a pre-seed round, which gave the exercise a fairly prompt encounter with reality.
They tried compound words next, placing possible beginnings and endings in a spreadsheet. Hundreds of combinations were sorted by availability and appeal. The method produced options, though none settled the question. So they moved to invented words, testing combinations of letters against spelling, pronunciation, search competition and feel.
Attio emerged from that process. It was a made-up word that could acquire meaning through the company’s work. The episode is a small window into the enterprise: imaginative ambition, followed by lists, checks and practical constraints. A five-letter name arrived by a route that would be familiar to anyone who has lost an afternoon to domain availability.
A note, an email, a philosophy
Sharp’s explanations of product design become more revealing when they reach small details. Consider a note-taking editor. The team knew similar capabilities would be needed for writing emails, saving drafts, making templates and adding comments. Building a common system meant those activities could share patterns. A user learning one part of the product would have less to learn elsewhere.
This is how an ambition for flexibility becomes a set of engineering decisions. A company can offer many features while asking its customers to understand relatively few recurring ideas. Sharp has described fighting the accumulation of overlapping systems, particularly when new features might otherwise be bolted onto the old ones. The question for a new component includes what it might support later.
He calls the people he wants to hire product engineers. Technical ability is part of the requirement, alongside concern for the finished experience. In his account, design includes how a system functions as well as how it looks. The neat interface and the data beneath it belong to the same argument.
His early funding announcement placed Attio alongside a wider movement represented by Notion, Airtable, Webflow and Zapier: software people could configure for their own work. Applied to CRM, that meant reducing repetitive input and allowing teams to decide how information should be organised. The customer would get more room to build.
A conceptual model, not a performance measurement.
The money arrives in chapters
The financial milestones show how much institutional support accumulated behind that proposition. A $7.7 million seed announcement in November 2021 named Point Nine as the lead investor. Redpoint led the $23.5 million Series A in March 2023. Another $33 million followed in August 2024, with existing investors and 01 Advisors participating.
Each announcement also added people to Sharp’s circle of experienced company builders. Alex Bard joined the board with the Series A. Dick Costolo, the former Twitter CEO and COO, participated through 01 Advisors in the 2024 financing. In August 2025, GV led a $52 million Series B, and Michael McBride, previously GitLab’s chief revenue officer, joined the board.
At that Series B announcement, Attio said it had 5,000 paying customers and had raised $116 million in total. Its customer list included Lovable, Granola, Modal and Replicate. Those are dated company milestones. They make the long preparation easier to see in perspective, without turning a financing announcement into a verdict on the product.
Individual announced amounts; bars share a $52m scale.
The job keeps changing
The person running the business has to change with it. Sharp describes the first phase of founding as doing almost every job. Waiting for code to run through GitHub Actions creates a moment to open Xero and tackle the accounts. Walking out for coffee creates a moment to answer customer tickets. The working day is a queue of different responsibilities, with the founder repeatedly joining the front.
As the team grows, the work shifts towards hiring people who can take those responsibilities further. Beyond roughly fifty people, he says, it becomes difficult to keep everyone’s activity in your head. Systems for sharing context, a leadership team and deliberate attention to culture become necessary. The chief executive cannot remain the company’s unofficial memory forever.
There is an apt connection between that management problem and the software Sharp builds. Both concern information that needs to move beyond a single person, reach the right place and remain useful as complexity increases. His own role has become another exercise in designing how work travels.
Where the agents go to work
In May 2026, Sharp introduced Attio’s GTM Atlas, a collection of operating perspectives for early teams. His argument was that AI had shortened the distance between an idea about customers and a working system. Teams could make more of their own decisions about how to reach, serve and retain customers, rather than inheriting a standard playbook from their tools.
“GTM is now a creative act.”
Nicolas Sharp, May 2026
That argument acquired a material price tag in September. Sharp announced that Attio had signed an eight-figure compute contract as the platform increasingly became a place where agents performed work. His accompanying explanation focused on where agents would be allowed to act on business data. The infrastructure bill belongs to a widening ambition for what a CRM should do.
The thread back to Fundstack remains visible. Sharp encountered software that made particular kinds of work awkward, then built a company around giving people more control over those arrangements. The tools have changed. The amount of computing involved has changed considerably. The desire to fit the software around the work has stayed.
His standard for success remains recognisably that of somebody who prefers building to passing judgment from another desk: customers who can build good businesses, and colleagues with worthwhile problems to solve. Attio began with founders willing to give up a working answer. Years later, Sharp is still occupied by the more demanding question that followed.