Why We Invested in Clarify
Ushering in the Autonomous GTM Era
At Essence Venture Capital, we back technical founders who are rethinking the infrastructure and tooling behind how modern teams work. Clarify is one of those companies.
We’re thrilled to share that we’ve invested in Clarify, the world’s first autonomous CRM, built from the ground up with AI at its core. This isn’t just another “AI-powered” layer slapped onto legacy software. Clarify is a ground-up rethink of how go-to-market teams operate—starting with the CRM and extending across the entire GTM stack.
But first, the team.
Betting on Builders We Know and Believe In
Clarify’s founding team. From left: Ondrej Hrebicek, Patrick Thompson, Austin Hay.
Clarify’s founding team are repeat founders and operators with the scars to prove it. We backed Patrick and Ondrej in their first startup, Iterative.ly, which was acquired by Amplitude in 2021.
Patrick Thompson is a repeat founder who previously co-founded Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude) and led product at Amplitude. With deep empathy for go-to-market teams and firsthand experience scaling data and analytics products, he’s uniquely positioned to reimagine CRM from the ground up.
Austin Hay brings a sharp operational lens to Clarify’s vision as a second-time founder. He was previously Head of MarTech at Ramp, and held roles at Runway, mParticle, and Branch—experiencing the fragmentation of modern sales stacks up close and developing a strong intuition for how commercial teams scale.
Ondrej Hrebicek is a three-time founder with a rare combination of technical depth and product intuition. He previously served as Director of Engineering at Amplitude and was CTO and co-founder of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude). Earlier, he founded Syncplicity (acquired by EMC), where he led engineering post-acquisition. Ondrej’s passion for elegant systems and user-centric design is reflected in every layer of Clarify’s architecture.
They are a team who felt the pain of trying to make duct-taped spreadsheets and lightweight CRMs work in early-stage environments firsthand—only to eventually trade them for bloated enterprise systems that require full-time administrators just to keep them alive.
Clarify is their answer to that pain. It’s a bold new category they’re pioneering: autonomous GTM.
From AI-Native to Autonomous: The Real CRM Shift
Over the past few years, we've watched the CRM category race to keep up with the AI wave. “AI-native” has become the phrase of the moment—used to describe everything from predictive fields to chatbots layered atop legacy systems. But as investors in technical products and buyers of CRM ourselves, we think this framing misses the deeper shift underway.
AI-native describes how a tool is built. But it doesn’t necessarily change how it works for the people using it.
Today’s sales teams—whether it’s a founder running GTM solo or an enterprise AE managing a complex pipeline—need more than reactive tools that wait for input. Most CRMs still act like ledgers: passive systems that expect to be filled out and micromanaged. They might help format the data or suggest the next field, but they don’t drive outcomes on their own.
We think that’s backwards.
Salespeople don’t need another inbox or database—they need leverage. They need systems that proactively surface insights, identify gaps, and move the ball forward without waiting for a prompt. Systems that anticipate their next step—not just record the last one. In short: CRMs need to evolve from static systems of record to intelligent systems of action.
We Use Clarify Ourselves
At Essence, we run a lean team. We don’t have time to maintain a CRM that expects to be babysat.
We’ve adopted Clarify as our source of truth for managing founder relationships and supporting our portfolio. We use its AI note taker in meetings to keep tabs on ongoing needs. Its automated daily briefings help us prep for calls. And the ability to customize workflows without dev support meant we could mold Clarify to the fast pace of venture without ever filing a Jira ticket.
If we can rely on Clarify to manage our venture operation, we’re confident GTM teams of all shapes and sizes can too.
Why This Market—and Why Now
Despite billions in CRM spend, most reps still spend over 70% of their week not selling. That’s because even with AI “enhancements,” most CRMs remain reactive, not proactive.
Clarify flips that model entirely. Early customers like Paramark and Volca have reported over 80% reductions in admin overhead, faster deal cycles, and happier reps.
As investors, we are also in good company. In its first year of existence, Clarify has raised $22.5M in funding from Madrona, USVP, Gradient, Ascend and more.
One customer put it best: “I know a lot about CRMs and I’ve fallen in love with Clarify.”
A Preview of the Autonomous Future
What excites us most is that CRM is just the beginning.The Clarify team is building toward a broader vision: the autonomous GTM stack—a unified system that blends product usage data, conversation intelligence, and automated workflows to drive the entire customer journey.
The future Clarify is building is one where GTM systems are ambient, intelligent, and truly helpful. Not dashboards. Not databases. But co-pilots that take real action and help teams do more with less.
In an era where software is being reimagined across every function, we believe GTM is overdue for its own revolution. And we couldn’t be more excited to back the team bringing that future to life.
For those who share our excitement, Clarify is now available to the public! Try it for free here.
