Attio

Nicolas Sharp and Alexander Christie founded Attio in London in 2019 with a conviction that violated standard startup advice: they would not ship until the product was genuinely ready. Every CRM they had studied had made architectural compromises early that haunted it for decades. Salesforce was powerful but slow to deploy. HubSpot was accessible but too rigid. Notion and Airtable were flexible but crumbled under scale. Rather than building on top of existing patterns, Sharp and Christie spent three years building from first principles — collecting emails via a waitlist and working tightly with a small number of design partners in closed beta.

Attio launched publicly in 2022, announcing a $7.7 million round led by Point Nine Capital. The product synced with email and calendar on signup and instantly created a rich view of every customer relationship — profiles, timelines, interaction history — without the user filling in a single field. The automatic enrichment and zero-setup experience became Attio's signature. The company crossed $1 million ARR in December 2022 and had 1,000 paying companies within 12 months of launch, growing across 100 countries.

Attio raised $23.5 million in a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in March 2023, with continued participation from Balderton Capital and Point Nine. The funding validated the thesis: the CRM market was enormous ($75 billion in 2024, growing to $160 billion by 2030) and deeply dissatisfied. Despite Salesforce commanding over 20% market share, the company had received so many unhappy customers that even its own customers described themselves as in "DIY mode." Attio was growing to 2,000 customers across 100 countries.

By August 2025, Attio had 5,000 customers and was on track to grow ARR four times in the year. A defining pattern had emerged: the fastest-growing AI companies in the world were choosing Attio for their CRM. OpenAI, Lovable, Granola, Modal, ElevenLabs, Vercel, and Replicate all built their go-to-market operations on Attio. This wasn't coincidence. AI-native companies refused to use legacy systems; they wanted a CRM that could be extended, automated, and adapted as fast as they moved.

Attio raised $52 million in a Series B led by GV (Google Ventures) in August 2025, with Redpoint, Balderton, and Point Nine participating. Total funding reached $116 million. Google Ventures' General Partner Michael McBride, former CRO of GitLab, joined the board. "It's been 25 years since the last major platform shift in CRM," McBride said. Attio's App SDK — enabling customers to build custom applications and extensions directly within the CRM — was in beta. The company that had refused to inherit bad patterns was now building the infrastructure for the next 25 years.