Christopher O’Donnell has a hobby. He likes music and playing the guitar, but most of all he loves creating software. So three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.aiCRM fit for the AI era.
Unlike modern CRM systems, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that someone has to fill out and update, Day learns every part about a person from conversations they’ve had with the company, emails and public records like LinkedIn.
O’Donnell knows CRM. He was responsible for creating one of the hottest, HubSpot’s.
O’Donnell spent greater than 10 years at HubSpot, initially improving the company’s marketing automation solution, and was later tapped by founder and former CEO Brian Halligan to build HubSpot’s customer relationship management tool. This CRM later became the product HubSpot is best known for, which ultimately helped O’Donnell earn the title of chief product officer.
Although O’Donnell enjoyed his job as an executive at HubSpot, which now has a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion, he missed building latest software. So in 2021, he left HubSpot to work on Arianna Huffington’s Thrive. He was also associated with ProfitWell, a bootstrap company he co-founded, which was sold to Paddle in 2022 for $200 million. O’Donnell didn’t see himself at Thrive long-term, so it got here to a point where he asked himself, “Should I retire?” he said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”
OpenAI then launched ChatGPT. New technology inspired him to start out something latest and do what he truly loves: creating software.
He returned with Michael Pici, previously vice chairman of sales and product at HubSpot. “Mike is brilliant,” O’Donnell said. “There aren’t many people who can spend all day with engineers and designers and then turn around and run the entire sales organization.”
The duo believed that advances in generative artificial intelligence provided the perfect opportunity to build the product that they had each all the time “dreamed” about.
In mid-2023, they began working on Day.ai, a CRM powered by generative artificial intelligence.
“Day is gathering all this information behind the scenes, and all you have to do is ask him a question and you’ll get the answers,” O’Donnell said. This means Day’s CRM system mechanically learns every part it needs about people behind the scenes.
So there is now not the must update and manually enter data to maintain the information up up to now.
On Thursday, the company proclaims a $4 million seed round led by Sequoia.
For now, Day’s CRM is available in an invite-only beta version, but O’Donnell and Pici have a lofty, long-term goal of constructing current versions of CRM irrelevant.
However, Day shouldn’t be expected to boost more capital any time soon. The round led by Sequoia is all the funding the company needs for now.
“There are four of us in the team. I pay myself minimum wage,” O’Donnell said. “We are happy as clams. It’s about the joy of starting over.”