Sumble.

Here is a secret about sales that nobody puts on a billboard: most of it is research. Before a single email goes out, someone has to figure out what a target company uses, what it is building, and who inside it can actually sign a check. It is unglamorous, it is slow, and it is the part everyone skips. Sumble's bet is that this is precisely the part worth automating.

Sumble is a San Francisco startup that crawls the public web - job boards, company websites, social media, regulatory filings - and feeds all of it into a knowledge graph underpinned by large language models. The output is not another contact list. It is context: which tools a company uses in which department, what projects it has underway, what technology it is looking to adopt, its org chart, and, crucially, who to talk to. The graph currently covers roughly 2.6 million companies worldwide, which is a lot of companies for a team of about 29 people to have mapped.

The leverage, of course, is the point. A company this size covering a dataset this large tells you the machines are doing the reading. That is the whole trick, and it is a trick these particular founders have pulled before.

The Kaggle Reunion

Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner are not first-timers. They built Kaggle - the data-science and machine-learning community that became a fixture of the field - and sold it to Google in 2017. Goldbloom ran it; Hamner was the technical backbone. They spent years watching how raw data becomes a decision, which is a useful thing to have watched if your next company is, essentially, a machine for turning raw web data into sales decisions.

They founded Sumble in 2022 and then did something increasingly rare: they stayed quiet. The company operated in stealth for roughly three years. It launched its product publicly in April 2024 and only emerged from stealth, with a press release and a funding announcement, in October 2025. By then it had already signed 19 enterprise customers. The order matters. Build first, announce later.

Context Over Contacts

The incumbents in this market - ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism and the rest - largely sell you a database of people: names, titles, emails, phone numbers. Useful, up to a point. Sumble's argument is that a phone number is worthless if you do not know why you are calling. Knowing that a company just posted twelve jobs for a data platform, or that it runs a particular stack in a particular department, is the difference between a pitch that lands and one that gets deleted. Whether that argument holds up against entrenched competitors is the open question. The early numbers suggest it might.

Consider the conversion rate. Roughly 30% of Sumble's users move from free to paid Pro plans. In freemium software, where the standard outcome is that almost nobody pays, 30% is the kind of figure that makes investors sit up. And the growth is not driven by a sales army - it spreads the way good tools spread, one forwarded link at a time, from a single user to hundreds inside the same organization. The company describes going from one to 500 monthly active users inside a single account in six months. That is product-led growth working as advertised, which is not something you get to say often.