By: Nate Bek & Kirby Winfield
Today, we’re excited to announce our follow-on investment in Clarify, the AI-native CRM platform. USVP and Madrona co-led the $15 million Series A round, joined by Ascend.
Clarify is what we believe the next generation of sales platforms will look like: autonomous, adaptive, and deeply integrated into how modern teams actually work.
Sales reps still spend 70% of their week not selling. CRMs were built as static databases and evolved into bloated admin tools. Even with a growing ecosystem of AI plugins, most remain passive and reactive.
Clarify is an autonomous CRM that eliminates manual entry and reduces operational drag. It prepares call briefs, enriches contact records, records and transcribes meetings, extracts action items, drafts follow-ups, and keeps pipeline data current. The system runs ambiently in the background, removing the need for reps to manage their tools instead of their pipeline.
While everyone else is adding more complexity through bespoke agents that require constant customization and maintenance, Clarify takes the opposite approach. Clarify internalized intelligence into what we call ambient intelligence — you don't manage agents, the CRM is the agent. It's always on, always working in the background
This fits squarely within our SaaS 3.0 thesis: software that applies AI to targeted, high-friction workflows with measurable return.
We backed Patrick Thompson’s last company, Iteratively, from first check through acquisition by Amplitude. We have seen firsthand how he executes. Clarify is his second act, and he came to us early with a clear read on the CRM market shaped by his experience building analytics products at Amplitude and managing GTM operations at Iteratively. He knew where existing CRMs fell short and what a modern system would require.
“This raise lets us accelerate the vision we’ve had since day one: reimagining the CRM from the ground up — autonomous, flexible, and finally built for the way teams actually work,” Patrick tells us. “What’s even more exciting is that it gives us the green light to go after the entire GTM stack. We’re not just building a better CRM — we’re building the platform we always wished existed.”
Patrick is joined by Austin Hay, previously at Ramp, and Ondrej Hrebicek, who co-founded Iteratively and worked at Amplitude. All three founders have built for high-growth environments and understand how today’s sales and product teams actually operate.
The market for CRM and adjacent tooling is crowded. Salesforce dominates enterprise CRM, while Hubspot has a lock on SMB. Gong focuses on meeting transcripts that get fed into Salesforce, while Outreach does enrichment of customer relationships. Companies also rely on pure transcription tools like Fireflies, Fathom, and Otter. These are large markets, and the incumbents are investing heavily in GenAI.
But they carry structural baggage. Decades of architecture optimized for manual input and seat-based pricing make it hard to adapt. Bolt-on AI can’t overcome a brittle foundation.
Salesforce and Hubspot remain data silos for many companies, with customer records, activity logs, and pipeline stages locked behind layers of manual upkeep and admin settings. Even AI-enabled versions of these platforms often require reps to tag records, summarize calls, and trigger follow-ups by hand.
Clarify is stitching this fragmented stack into a single autonomous system. By consolidating functionality and embedding AI from the ground up, Clarify avoids the layering problem that plagues incumbents.
The product is in active use across more than 100 customers, with over 70% engaging weekly. Customers include Paramark, Ravenna, Sift, Volca, and more. Clarify's pricing model gives customers unlimited users on all plans and charges based on usage rather than seats. The company now has around 20 employees, up from 12 at the start of 2024, and is hiring across engineering and go-to-market. Open roles are live on the Ascend Job Board.
Clarify was seeded in Q1 2024 and raised its Series A in Q1 2025. According to Carta, fewer than 9% of startups seeded in Q1 2024 had reached a Series A within four quarters. Clarify outperformed that benchmark.
We are proud to have been the first institutional investor in both of Patrick’s companies and to continue supporting the team as they take on one of the most entrenched and inefficient layers in enterprise software.