For Humantic AI, 2024 was a foundational year. With the market still oscillating between optimism and pessimism, we used the time to move forward, as well as dig deeper.
I believe that we have now built a base that will define how tall the building on top of it can be.
We started the year with a bang, with Angellist Quant Fund inbounding to invest. Their thesis is that the companies that attract the best talent become the most successful. And in Feb 2024, their Wellfound platform showed the best talent in the world was heading to Humantic AI!
In April 2024, the team jetted off to Vietnam for its first international offsite. For a couple of people on the team, it was the first international trip. And for one person, it was the first flight ever. It definitely lent more meaning to the act.
Between May and September 2024, we executed on the brand front. Executing multiple thunderclaps and culminating with a lightning strike during Dreamforce 2024. We launched a music album (yes, a music album!), put our customers and advisors on a truck in Vegas, and plastered Market St. in San Francisco with posters like these.
We literally flew planes in the sky, asking some simple questions – like “Are salespeople pests?”
So was it any surprise that we had journalists running after our marketing team and featuring us on top of the page?
In 2024, we put in place a solid team – the average capability level of the team today is 2X of what it probably was at the start of the year. Vishal joined as our CTO & Cofounder in September, and Abhineet came onboard to head marketing in November.
And we will soon have a Sales and CS leader! (P.S. We are looking aggressively – get in touch!)
As if all this wasn’t enough, we did in December what only half a dozen startups in any space manage to do every year – we had Gartner put us on its 2024 list of Cool Vendors in AI-led Sales Research!
Including Databook, Docket AI, Matik and Clay, only 5 companies in the world are on that list (something to keep in mind, leaders!)
And while all this was happening, we weren’t sitting ideal on the business front either.
- We signed multiple Fortune 500 companies as customers, including companies like AWS, Cushman & Wakefield, NextEra Energy etc.
- We signed a dozen public/private enterprises as customers, including companies like Mitel, Firstsource, Gitlab etc.
- We established Buyer Intelligence as a category. Gartner is now using the terminology in multiple places and says that 44% of sellers use Buyer Intelligence.
- Not just Cool Vendors, we got named to 2024 Gartner Hype Cycle for Revenue Technology as well. And Gartner now recommends “people intelligence” as a core piece of its recommendation on what it called AI-led Sales Research!
- More than half of our customers expanded. Anywhere from a few seats worth a few grand to hundreds of additional seats worth 6-figure expansions!
- Anyone who took some time to measure the impact reported numbers that often seemed mind-bending. When the Domo Data team sat down to measure the impact of Humantic AI, they noticed that deals where Humantic AI was used had closed 37% more. And at least 20-30% of that was because of Humantic AI they felt, as their CDO Mohammed Aaser shares in this video!
- Our results have been so powerful that where others publish case studies, we published a whole damn Results Book . (Does that make us the first company to do so?)
- With all of this going on, it was no surprise that our churn for the year was less than 15%, and NRR at 132%. (That NRR is unheard of for an early stage company!)
- With almost a dozen deep integrations inside all major sales tools, we
probablydefinitely built the most integrated experience for our users. Whether you are using Outlook on the desktop, prospecting using Salesloft, or closing on Salesforce, you will find us embedded beautifully everywhere!
Now, we didn’t get everything right.
While we brought on board some great people, we still had to let almost 10 people go. A number I am not very proud of – because it means that we, or rather me, need to get better at recruiting top talent.
While we executed quite well on revenue, we failed to close some close deals that could have made a visible difference.
While we made our product enterprise ready, I think we lost some edge on groundbreaking innovation. The product has differentiated value for certain key segments (luckily for us!), but we need to quickly regain that edge and put competition far, far behind.
As we get going with 2025, I feel that we have absolute clarity on every front. We have clear and differentiated positioning, we know our ICP extremely well, we know the segments where we can make a difference within a quarter, and enough of our customers in those are ready to talk about the difference they have seen first-hand.
It is now a matter of execution. A matter of building on that solid foundation and delivering on the promise.
So this year, that is what we will do. Execute.
