Unify.

There is a genre of B2B software that promises to help you send more email, faster, to more people, and if that describes the thing you want then there are roughly forty companies eager to sell it to you. Unify, a San Francisco company founded in 2023, has spent its short life arguing the opposite - that the volume was the bug, and that the fix is to reach fewer people at moments when they are actually paying attention. The company calls this "warm outbound," which is a nicer phrase than "please stop cold-emailing strangers," though it means something close to that.

The origin story is the kind investors like because it is also a diagnosis. Austin Hughes, now Unify's CEO, ran the outbound sales program at Ramp, the fast-growing fintech, and watched a decade-old playbook stop working. Cold email had been a reliable machine: put names in one end, get meetings out the other. By the early 2020s the machine sputtered. Everyone had the same tools, the same templates, the same enrichment data, and inboxes had developed antibodies. The intuition Hughes took away was that the raw material - who's hiring, who just raised, who's poking around your pricing page - was all sitting there unused, scattered across systems that didn't talk to each other.

So he called a college classmate. Connor Heggie had been doing machine-learning research and product engineering at Scale AI, the company that turns messy data into things models can learn from, which is a useful background for a business whose entire premise is connecting messy data to a send button. Heggie became CTO. Their shared thesis - the sort of sentence that fits on a slide but takes years to build - was that the right person should get the right message at the right time, and that almost nobody could actually do this because the plumbing was a disaster.

The plumbing, it turns out, is the moat. It is tempting to describe Unify as "AI writes your sales emails," because AI does write some of the emails, and that is the part that demos well. But the harder and more valuable work is upstream: ingesting first- and third-party signals, stitching in enrichment data, deciding which of those signals actually predicts that someone will buy, and then triggering an action without a human babysitting each step. The AI copywriting is the last inch of a very long pipe.

What Unify sells, concretely, is three things that behave like one. Signals watches more than 25 indicators - website visits, hiring, funding, product usage, third-party intent from sources like 6sense, G2 and Clearbit - and flags when a prospect is warming up. Plays are automated workflows that take those signals and run prospecting, enrichment, AI research and sequencing on autopilot. And the research agents do the reading a diligent rep never has time for - scraping news and context so the eventual message references something real rather than a mail-merge token.

The customer list is the tell. When companies like Cursor, Perplexity and Together AI - outfits that could plausibly build this themselves over a long weekend - choose to buy it instead, that is a small vote of confidence in the idea that this is genuinely annoying to do well. Perplexity, by Unify's account, booked $1.7 million in pipeline through the platform. Airwallex and Flock Safety are on the list too. There is a slightly recursive quality to an AI company selling growth software to other AI companies, and Unify seems entirely comfortable with it.

The money has followed the logic. Unify came out of stealth in early 2024 with a $6.6 million seed round from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive and Emergence, having also passed through OpenAI's Converge accelerator. A $12 million Series A arrived that October. Then, in mid-2025, Battery Ventures led a $40 million Series B, with the earlier backers piling back in and Battery's Dharmesh Thakker taking a board seat. In between, the company says revenue grew eightfold, it hit $1 million in ARR in eleven months and $2 million just two months after that, and it went from seven people to roughly fifty.

None of that guarantees anything - plenty of companies have grown revenue eightfold on the way to nowhere in particular, and "warm outbound" is a positioning that competitors like Clay, Apollo and Outreach can and will echo. But Unify has picked a metric that is unusual and a little disciplined for the category: it says the number that matters is a genuine positive reply, not an open or a click. That is a harder thing to game, and it points the product away from the volume treadmill that made cold email stop working in the first place. Whether the best products actually win on distribution is still, in the most literal sense, an open question. Unify has raised sixty-odd million dollars to argue that they can.