Austin Hughes is moving fast and so is his company. Unify, the startup he co-founded to help sales teams automate and personalize outbound campaigns, has raised $40 million in a new funding round led by Battery Ventures, with participation from OpenAI’s Startup Fund, Thrive Capital, Emergence Capital, and others. The round values the company at $260 million and comes just nine months after its Series A.
Unify is at the center of a growing demand among AI-native startups and tech-forward companies looking to scale their go-to-market motions without dramatically expanding headcount. Its customers include Perplexity, Cursor, Together AI, Flock Safety, and SoFi, startups known for rapid growth and lean teams. In June, Unify crossed $5.6 million in annualized revenue, with sales climbing 17% month over month.
“Our whole product philosophy is about the right person, right timing, right message,” Hughes told Upstarts. “We’re building for small, efficient sales teams that want to punch above their weight with software doing the heavy lifting.”
That approach has resonated with a wave of new AI companies navigating aggressive growth targets and heightened competition. For Cursor, one of Unify’s earliest customers, the software runs as a full-stack command center for outbound campaigns, helping the startup prioritize leads, personalize messages, and prevent crosswire communication.
“We don’t think we’ll win by waiting,” said George Hou, who leads GTM engineering at Cursor. “We need to set the pace, define the category, and build deep, lasting relationships with our customers.”
What makes Unify compelling to these companies is the orchestration. A visitor might hit a company’s website, triggering a behind-the-scenes sequence that checks whether they’re a decision-maker, whether anyone from the team is already in touch, and what message they should receive. All of it is designed to run in the background, within minutes.
That precision is what sold Ethan Dursht, who leads growth at demo software startup Navattic. Within the first week of using Unify, his team booked 10 meetings and sourced over $100,000 in pipeline. At a previous startup, Unify helped close a $50,000 deal in less than two weeks. “We didn’t want to leave revenue on the table,” Dursht said. “Speed to lead is everything.”
Hughes, a former investment analyst at SoftBank and early hire at Ramp, spent years observing how elite teams scale products, especially ones without brand advantage. “One of the things the Ramp founders understood more deeply than most was that distribution is the core problem companies face,” he said.
By 2022, that lesson collided with the momentum around large language models. Hughes, inspired by what GPT-3 was making possible, reconnected with his Rice University classmate Connor Heggie, then a machine learning engineer at Scale AI. Together, they launched Unify to address what they saw as a growing operational blind spot: connecting real-time buyer intent to execution in outbound sales.
In a recent podcast appearance on TBPN, Hughes expanded on how Unify was designed with the junior rep in mind. “You used to have to push a million boxes to get to the place where you’d actually do something that was valuable,” he said. “We take care of all that on your behalf.” The platform builds lists, pulls data, and surfaces insights so SDRs can focus less on manual tasks and more on thoughtful outreach. “You can start from the 90-yard line,” he added.
The company has also launched what Hughes called an “observation model” a flexible, memory-like layer that tracks every interaction between seller and buyer, offering AI agents deeper context over time. “It’s not a database,” he said. “It’s a text doc of every notable piece of context.” That memory system is now embedded across customer accounts, helping teams avoid redundant contact and personalize communication more intelligently.
Unify doesn’t aim to replace sales reps, but to make them more efficient and strategic. It’s a position that contrasts with startups building fully autonomous AI SDRs. “Growth should be a science, not an art,” Hughes said. “We’re not trying to eliminate humans, we’re trying to help them spend more time on what they do best.”
Still, the rise of tools like Unify raises the question: will personalization at scale simply result in more noise? Hughes believes the answer lies in taste and timing. “AI doesn’t feel,” he said during the TBPN interview. “So it can’t really use that judgment.” But the software can get teams closer by simplifying execution and freeing up bandwidth for reps to add a human touch.
Unify marked its funding announcement with personalized Cameo messages for partners and customers—an example of creative outreach grounded in thoughtfulness, not volume. “What matters is that the idea originated from something special,” Hughes said. “And the actual delivery is the same quality you’d put out as a human.”
Many startups, they noticed, were good at collecting data on who might be a good customer but had no system for acting on it quickly. Even when a website visitor submitted their email, companies didn’t always know whether it was the right contact or if that person had already been contacted by another rep. Unify promised to handle that complexity: ingesting the signal, routing the outreach, and ensuring that each touchpoint was context-aware.
Rather than replacing sales reps entirely with AI, a trend many in the industry are pursuing but Unify focuses on amplification. Its platform gives junior salespeople everything they need to identify and engage high-potential leads before passing them to more senior account executives. In that model, outbound becomes a coordinated, repeatable process, less guesswork, more velocity.
“Our goal isn’t to eliminate the human from the loop,” Hughes said. “It’s to make sure that when a rep does get involved, it’s with the right context and at the right moment.”
The broader shift Unify is capitalizing on is already underway. In an environment where product quality is no longer the only determinant of success, the ability to scale intelligent distribution has become make-or-break. Battery Ventures’ Dharmesh Thakker, who joins Unify’s board, believes the company is tapping into a fundamental transformation in go-to-market software.
“Every distribution channel is saturated,” Thakker said. “Search algorithms are changing constantly, cold outbound doesn’t work the way it used to, and social is noisier than ever. Unify has built a system that cuts through that by turning intent signals into real action.”
Thakker sees parallels between Unify and some of Battery’s past GTM investments, including Marketo, Gong, and Braze. What distinguishes Unify, he said, is its ability to surface purchase signals buried inside disconnected systems and use AI agents to orchestrate campaigns that actually land.
To some, though, that orchestration raises concerns. With more companies able to send tailored outreach across multiple channels, will tools like Unify simply flood inboxes with a more advanced form of spam?
Hughes is aware of the risk, but dismisses it as a problem of execution. “People don’t care if a message is personalized by a human or AI,” he said. “They care if it helps them solve a problem at the right time.” He points to his own experience of buying software from Carta via a cold email because it offered an answer he was actively looking for.
Unify is already expanding its feature set, adding LinkedIn messaging to its playbooks and building a native dialer. It’s also exploring product usage signals, helping sales teams better engage free-tier users who show buying intent. Roughly a quarter of Unify’s own pipeline now comes from using its own product.
The team, currently 50 people strong, includes alumni from Airbnb, Scale AI, Webflow, Ramp, and Waymo. Unify is hiring across roles, with 15 open positions across engineering, product, and go-to-market.
“We’re not just another tool in the stack,” Hughes said. “We’re trying to unify what modern growth looks like—so that sellers spend less time chasing leads and more time doing what they’re best at: selling.”
