How Attio 3x'ed its customers in the last year, with CEO Nicolas Sharp

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. Today I have got Nicolas Sharp on the show who is the CEO of Atio. Atio is the, become well renowned for the AI CRM, the AI native CRM. UK company raised the big Series B last year and it's just overall crushing it. Thank you for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be back three short months after the first one. Yeah, well, thrilled to have you. It's good fun. Last time we were talking about the developer platform today, you've got some more news to announce. Take it away. What's going on? Hey, Seb. Thanks for having us.

0:34Yeah, we've got a big, big, big launch today. One of the biggest yet. We're launching Ask Atio, which is a paradigm shift for CRM as a category. And it's a new AI layer that can reason and act on everything in your CRM. So that's all of the context that we gather, whether it's emails and calls and calendar, but also product data, data from your data warehouse, web searches, enrichment data, etc. And it can do all sorts of incredible and powerful things, but fundamentally it sort of flips the relationship of what a CRM is. and it is now a incredibly helpful tool for the end user where you can go and ask questions of a customer and actually get it to take action on your behalf, which is, you know, for historic users of CRMs will seem like a very unfamiliar thing.

1:36So the idea is that you've got that context layer, it's taking all the company data, taking every bit of information they've input into Atio and then you're able to actually ask it questions and say, uh whatever how much revenue am i getting from this from this client what's pipeline what kind of examples can you give yeah so it actually goes a bit it goes a bit beyond that um it it will certainly take stuff that you've put into atio um but actually beyond that it will also ingest things like your team's email and calendar uh it will perform web searches and uh and do sort of data enrichment. It will also take product data and data from your data warehouse or wherever it might be and actually get a real complete picture of what's going on.

2:24And you can certainly ask the questions that you mentioned. But beyond that, you can do things like actually do sequences of action. So things like follow-up calls when you've finished, when you finished, sorry, follow-up emails when you finished calls. But beyond that, at the end of the week, what have I missed? Help me find customers that are falling through the gaps.

2:54It goes further. And the sort of things that I've been using it for are doing things like daily briefings for our whole sales team. So at the end of the day, I have a saved prompt that will run in Atio across all of our sales team and will highlight things to me that I need to know as CEO. So what are positive things that customers are saying? What are feature gaps that we need to plug, et cetera? And the beauty of this is that this is something that I could have done manually if I had sort of 12 hours a day to scrub through all of the calls. I would need more than 12 hours a day. If I had infinite time, I could have done manually, but I can now do it in 10, 15 seconds.

3:35and it's a pretty big shift in the usefulness of the data that you have in the CRM and just the level of automation you can achieve. That's amazing. It's almost like a RevOps person on steroids times a thousand. For everyone on the team that delivers results in one to five seconds. It's amazing. Yeah, and I used to do some revenue operations and it's like, it's so hard to navigate your way through complex CRMs to try and extract the meaningful data that you need. Is this like the big hard launch? Have you been trialing or testing it with kind of customers in the background? Yeah, we've been in beta with about 100 companies for the last few months.

4:17We have the sort of the universal context and the underlying back to store has been something that we've been working on for a really long time. I mean, it just requires a lot of deep investment in data sync. We're doing this thing at real scale now. Actually, we had a peak day last week where we did inference on 122 million emails. So the scale is big now and it requires deep investments in engineering. And one of the things that is always frustrating, like sales leaders and go-to-market teams generally, is just the amount of data that you need to input into CRMs. Is the vision that this can actually reduce that?

5:02You're no longer going to have to take things from calls or meetings or emails. And so the vision is not actually just keep it and extract it, but also it can start to take data from your various sources so that your team doesn't have to. That's exactly right. And if you actually, if you rewind the clock even a year, humans were largely doing the work that LLMs are doing now, which were you were the thing that went from the messy world of unstructured data to structured data so as a crn user as a salesperson you would go and do go get on a call and your job would of course be primarily to provide a service to the customer make a sale but there was a sort of a secondary aspect of the role which was do the inference listen to what said pass out the data and enter it manually into the database.

5:53And the usefulness of that was pretty limited to reporting, honestly. Very few salespeople would say, no, the CRM is totally key for me to kind of hit my numbers. And what we've done is completely flipped that script where instead of the CRM asking questions of you, you can actually now go and ask questions of the CRM. And it does provide immense usefulness. And the only way you can really do that is by having all the data. As soon as you're missing some of the context, then it all falls apart. And so we spent a long time gathering that context. And now we've tied it all together with this new launch.

6:34And what was the response like during the beta phase? Oh, it's been awesome. It's been really awesome. It's been great. I mean, it's been a pretty, I think, pretty paradigm shift for people that use the product. And what's also cool is we've just discovered a ton of use cases along the way. It's one of those things where you're providing a tool that has such infinite permutations of use and some of them are really beyond our wildest dreams. So it's very cool to see what people have been using it for. It's amazing. and 100 clients using it is a big number right it's like a not a small trial that's like a quite a widespread uh yeah i mean we're up to almost uh we're up to um around 7 000 paying customers now or paying you know companies um and so yeah it's um it's it's a small percentage of our of our user base but it's it's enough for us to really battle test things get really good feedback um Yeah, and really kind of polish and refine.

7:47If I remember correctly, I think when you did your Series B last summer, it was 4 ,000. I think that was the... So that's pretty substantial growth in, I guess, what's less than a year. Yeah, it's less than a year. It's about... How long ago was it? I guess about six... No, is it six months ago? Something like that, yeah. That's amazing. I think it was like last July that we did the Series B. So we've sort of doubled in the last six, seven months. Where's that growth coming from? It is, we're geographically pretty distributed. So we have 50 % of our businesses in the US, 50 % is rest of the world.

8:24Rest of the world really means predominantly Western Europe, France, Germany, UK. We have customers very globally, though. We've got lots of customers in Australia. We've got customers all over Europe, in Asia, et cetera. And from a market segment perspective, we have a very, very big customer base in tech. And that's growing really quickly and a really big segment for us. We have a lot of SMB customers, which are brilliant because the use cases are so varied. And that's actually where you start to see some really interesting use cases. And then we also have a pretty sizable business in what we call FinServe, which is finance and service businesses.

9:16And so that might be, it could be anything from law firms to venture capital to agencies, etc. So, yeah, it's a pretty diverse group of customers. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, it's phenomenal growth to go from$4 ,000 to$7 ,000 in like seven months. Do you have a view on where you might get to by the end of year? We do. We do. We have very, very ambitious targets. I'll give you, I have to be a bit sort of selective in what I share. But what I will tell you is we are growing faster now than we were a year ago. And so it's kind of, it's perhaps slightly counterintuitive. But when you're building a platform product like ours, it weirdly becomes easier to grow and to scale the more that you've built.

10:06It's very difficult to have an MVP of a go-to-market platform of a CRM. So we're actually finding that as we build out more, we're able to scale faster. And that's really interesting as you add more features and more use cases. you're able to tick more of the boxes for the icp yeah and you're just able to you're able to just provide more value you're able to solve more problems end to end people need to have um use fewer tools etc and the your product market fit uh gets stronger um it's it's an interesting time to be talking about product market fit because the what expectations of product are changing a lot market is changing a lot um and so like every company we're in constant r &d mode um and so we're sort of you know we're we're constantly trying to push the boundaries of what's possible um but we're definitely finding that as we build out more of atio um we that we just get kind of stronger and stronger product market fit yes amazing i think it's one of the things that i was speaking to victor from synthetra about and i think the same thing applies to atio in that lots of the AI tools are having to, you know, I think Lovable has spoken about having to refine product market fit every three months as like the AI changes, the customer base changes, everything moves so quickly, they have to keep iterating finding product market fit.

11:33And, you know, they're also coupled with, coupled with like lower retention, lower margins and higher expectations on growth. Whereas I think companies like yours and Synthesia, which are B2B SaaS, enterprise, but like AI at the core, you're able to to to take advantage of both the ai hype and the growth that you see from there with also the really strong fundamentals that we saw of the saz era are you seeing that reflected in your like retention as well we we are so our nrr continues to just get better and better um but i think there is there is definitely you know even for for our business an element of truth well more than an element of truth I think it's true that the expectations of what software can do

12:21are changing so quickly and the capabilities of the models and the protocols etc change so quickly and it provides such value to our customers that we really really want to be in R &D mode so we can kind of keep pushing the boundary on what the product can do. And I think you have to these days build a company that is deeply technical, deeply product-focused, and deeply nimble. Because if you don't, competitors will. And the leaps that you can make in products every quarter, this is not like incremental gains. This is paradigm shifts constantly. And so you've really got to keep up. And more than that, you've really got to lead.

13:09And are you keeping an eye on your competitors and seeing, because a lot of your competitors are like$100 billion companies that were tech and nimble maybe 20 years ago, but now they've become their large incumbents. Are you watching them at all or are you sort of just laser focused on delivering your own value? We're so deeply involved with the market, with our customers, with prospects, etc. And CRM is a big decision. It's not something you sort of buy on a whim. so we we we have to really understand the market really understand our competitors strengths weaknesses etc so we we do but um but it doesn't really it doesn't it doesn't affect our roadmap or what we're trying to build um and we have a very clear vision of what we're trying to get to which is quite differentiated from from what's in the market and we wouldn't want that to be to be skewed by what other people are doing.

14:04But of course, yeah, you know, we have to, we've got to go out every day and we've got to prove that we're the best solution for our customers. And part of doing that is knowing what the alternatives are. You're talking about this like paradigm shift. This sounds like a game-changing product within CRM. Last time we spoke, you were launching the developer platform, which was like enabling developers to build on top of SEO. And you're always talking about like vibe coding within the CRM. these are like really transformative or unusual types of products to be building within CRMs can you touch a bit about how the developer platform released when looking back three months ago like how how was that it's been awesome i mean we've we've seen a huge number of apps built and the ecosystem of attio continues to grow and we continue to connect to more and more tools we've added since the launch we've added a lot of capabilities to the sdk So it's much more powerful.

14:58It just continues to get more and more powerful. And we've actually got a couple of exciting launches coming up in the next couple of months, which really continue to push the boundaries there. But what we've actually been really surprised by is how much this SDK gets used to build internal tools and to customize Atio for the end user. So we get on calls now with customers that aren't just installing ecosystem apps, but they're actually building their own to do this deep customization. And again, the sort of creativity that people have when they're building these things is mind-blowing. That's amazing.

15:46Yeah. And actually, if you think about where software is going, we're increasingly convinced that that level of customization is going to be completely expected. And so we're hopefully ahead of the curve here in kind of allowing our users to vibe code and define their own functionality and business logic within the platform. But as a strategy, it's something that we're just doubling down on. And it must be absolutely amazing for stickiness and retention. You know, if they're building their own tools inside, you know, your own developer SDK, that must be phenomenal. Do you see that in the data already or is it too early?

16:32No, we do. So we know that there's a really strong correlation between people that both install apps and then also build their own and retention. And of course, we're just trying to make this easier and easier. We're starting to put more and more sort of outlets or more and more surface area for our JavaScript runtime, our code runtime. And in the next, as we release more things, you'll start to see more and more utilization of that kind of core IP. And I don't want to spoil future launches, but we've got a lot of cool applications coming. Amazing. In the last couple of minutes, I just want to get your view on the wider state of the market, I guess.

17:17You know, last time, about probably the time that we were chatting last year, I was speaking to some founders who were looking at raising their second or third round of the year. And a part of that was like apprehension about the market and whether there There was going to be a recalibration looking into 2026. How do you feel in your position now and the state of the market? So I feel good. We're really well capitalized. So we have, you know, we've got plenty of capital, plenty of runway, and we are growing really quickly. And so from a metrics perspective, we're feeling really good. But equally, yeah, it's turbulent.

17:57You would have seen in the last few weeks all of the companies coming out with decent earnings and then taking a massive hit and revenue sort of revenue multiples being pretty low and all these kind of things. So the public market stuff definitely has a knock on effect to the private markets, especially when you start to look at growth rounds. And it's something that we are. Yeah, you've got to be aware of and you have to plan accordingly. but it it for us right now it really isn't it doesn't change anything we're growing really really well we see a massive opportunity um there is clearly a there is a clearly a sort of consensus building that potentially you know that perhaps the old guard are going to get disrupted and that would be great for us that's what we want that's what we're trying to be the disruptors so you know as much as as much as we sort of pay attention to what's happening in the public markets um ultimately we're trying to you know we're trying to disrupt these companies and um and so yeah so so it's it's um doesn't change too much for us right now given it sounds like everything's going really well right you're you're releasing great products that are being well received by your customers you're growing your rate of growth is getting faster and faster great retention as you say there's growing consensus that you know the old established tech companies are going to be disrupted.

19:24Are you getting preemptions? Are you getting investors who are showing interest already? Yeah, I mean, we've been doing this for, we've done enough fundraising now to kind of, I guess, to know that it can take up all of your time. And so we try to, you know, when you get to a certain stage, it wasn't always like this, by the way, When we started Atio, there was no consensus on CRM. And the first few years were like a serious grind to get the product into any kind of workable fashion, etc. But we're in a lucky position now where we do have a lot of interest. We do have a lot of kind of access to caps on stuff.

20:13And that's really important. but the focus for us right now is especially because we are really well capitalized and we raised our Series B when we were in a position of strength. We didn't need the capital, so we're very well capitalized and we're in the luxurious position now of being able to be pretty heads down on customers and R &D. Amazing. Well, it sounds like things are going really well. I'm super excited to see the response to this launch and we'll probably catch up in another few months when you've got your next big release. Yes, and you're invited to our new office as well. So we'd love to do that at some point.

20:55Yeah, yeah, let's do it. And keep up the good work and let's go. Let's go. All right, thank you very much. Thanks, Seb. Chat soon.

21:14Thank you.