Clarify, the Seattle-based AI startup that has raised more than $22 million to take on Salesforce and other CRM incumbents, has made its first acquisition: San Francisco-based Seam AI.
Seam’s technology monitors buying signals across the web — such as funding rounds, hiring, website activity, and executive job moves — and surfaces them to sales teams. Clarify plans to fold the technology into a new product called Clarify Signals, slated to launch later this year.
Clarify is led by co-founders Patrick Thompson (CEO) and Ondrej Hrebicek (CTO), who previously co-founded Iteratively, a Seattle data-analytics startup that was acquired in 2021 by Amplitude, the publicly traded digital-analytics company.
Rationale: Clarify says the deal is part of a shift beyond what it calls a “system of record” that tracks what already happened to a “system of awareness” that flags what’s about to happen.
Thompson said the Seam deal fills a gap in what Clarify’s own AI can pull from the open web, giving the CRM access to proprietary datasets that can’t be reached with a simple search.
“The value that Seam is providing is typically the information that’s not necessarily easy to get from the web,” Thompson explained in an interview. “It’s the harder stuff to find.”
Hrebicek said Clarify’s customers have been looking for a bigger and richer dataset — the ability to “look around the corners on who would be a good lead.”
Deal points: Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Clarify, which had raised a total of $22.5 million in its seed and Series A rounds from investors including U.S. Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Madrona, said it brought in additional funding as part of the deal but did not disclose the amount.
As part of the acquisition, five Seam employees are joining Clarify, including Seam co-founder and CEO Nicholas Scavone. With the deal, Clarify is adding a San Francisco office alongside its Seattle headquarters. The company now has 30 people total.
Backstory: Scavone started Seam in 2020 after five years at Okta, where he saw teams accumulate many different sales and marketing systems, with customer data scattered across all of them.
Seam raised $7 million including angel funding and a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2024. It counts Zapier, GoFundMe, Drata, and Betterment among its customers. Existing customers are on hold while the technology is integrated into Clarify, but many have already indicated they plan to move over to the new platform.
Scavone said he had been weighing whether to raise a new round or find a home for the company when he and Thompson, who have known each other for years, began talking about a combination.
“We’re all going after the same big incumbents here,” he said, explaining that he ultimately decided Seam had a better chance of taking on the market’s dominant players by joining forces with Clarify than as a standalone company.
In a post announcing the deal, the Seam and Clarify founders said they “realized we weren’t building competing products—we were building different halves of the same future.”
Landscape: Clarify is entering a crowded field. Sales-intelligence platforms like Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo already sell third-party data to revenue teams, and 6sense and Demandbase lead the account-based marketing category Seam had been targeting.
Thompson said one edge for Clarify is that signals arrive inside the CRM sellers already use, not a separate dashboard.
The company was co-founded in early 2024 by Thompson, Hrebicek, and Austin Hay, a marketing-technology operator who served as co-CEO alongside Thompson. Hay departed in September 2025 and is now with Khosla Ventures, per his LinkedIn.
What’s next: Clarify plans to launch Signals later this year, Thompson said, noting that the company is considering raising additional funds in a Series B round early next year.
Uber’s $14.8 billion Delivery Hero acquisition would expand its global delivery business and intensify consolidation across Europe and Asia.
The post Uber’s $14.8B Delivery Hero Deal Expands Its Reach Across Europe, Asia appeared first on TechRepublic.
Uber’s $14.8 billion Delivery Hero acquisition would expand its global delivery business and intensify consolidation across Europe and Asia.
The post Uber’s $14.8B Delivery Hero Deal Expands Its Reach Across Europe, Asia appeared first on TechRepublic.
Live-shopping unicorn Whatnot is expanding its AI capabilities with the acquisition of Shaped, a startup that builds real-time recommendation and search technology.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will join Whatnot to lead a new applied AI research team focused on improving how buyers discover live streams, sellers and products across the marketplace. Before co-founding Shaped in 2021, Murrell worked on machine learning and recommendation systems at Meta.
Backed by Seattle venture firm Madrona, Shaped developed AI technology designed to deliver highly personalized recommendations in real time — a key capability for Whatnot’s fast-moving live shopping platform, where inventory and buyer interest change by the second.
The acquisition comes as Whatnot continues to invest heavily in engineering and AI. Last year, the company announced plans to significantly expand its Seattle engineering hub after leasing new downtown office space following a $225 million funding round that valued the company at $11.5 billion.
The company has said Seattle will serve as one of its key engineering centers as it continues to scale its platform. The Whatnot offices in Seattle are led by head of engineering Daniel Bear, the former head of infrastructure at Snap.
Whatnot is based in Culver City, California. The offices in the Seattle area are one of more than 100 engineering centers in the region, as tracked by GeekWire.
For Madrona, the deal represents another exit for a portfolio company applying AI to solve core business problems, reinforcing the firm’s continued focus on infrastructure and enterprise AI startups.
Common Room, the fast-rising Seattle startup that built an AI-powered platform to help sales and marketing teams track buying signals across their customers, is being acquired by Zoom.
Terms of the deal were not revealed in a news release on Thursday.
“When we founded Common Room in 2020, we set out with a simple vision: to transform how organizations connect with people,” Common Room co-founder and CEO Linda Lian wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Over the past six years, we’ve had the privilege of building alongside our customers through one of the biggest shifts in enterprise software, the rise of AI.”
Zoom said the acquisition will extend its Zoom Revenue Accelerator platform “upstream,” pairing Common Room’s buyer intelligence with the conversation data Zoom already captures from sales calls — giving reps insight into which accounts are in-market and why to reach out before a call even happens.
“Revenue teams will now have a single, unified platform that will help them reach the right person at the right moment with the right message at every stage of a deal, cutting busywork,” Abhisht Arora, Zoom’s chief strategy officer, said in a blog post.
Common Room emerged from stealth in 2021 with $52 million in funding from investors including Index Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Next Play Ventures, Greylock, 01 Advisors and a bevy of angel investors — Etsy CEO Josh Silverman; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; and former Axiom CEO Elena Donio.
Early customers included Notion and Pulumi, and the roster has grown to include enterprises large and small.
Lian, a former associate at Madrona Venture Group and senior product marketing manager at Amazon Web Services, co-founded the company alongside three other Seattle tech vets: CTO Viraj Mody, a former engineering director at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO at Convoy; chief architect Tom Kleinpeter, previously a principal engineer at Dropbox; and design chief Francis Luu, who spent 10 years at Facebook.
Common Room was the 2022 GeekWire Awards Startup of the Year and is No. 80 on the GeekWire 200, our ranked index of Pacific Northwest startups.
Zoom, the San Jose, Calif.-based company best known for its video conferencing platform, has expanded in recent years into AI-powered tools for sales, customer service and workplace collaboration. The publicly traded company reported nearly $4.9 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and has a market capitalization of roughly $25 billion.
“Joining Zoom connects our graph to the conversations sellers have every day where deals are actually won and to the AI that can act on it,” Lian said in a statement. “With Zoom’s scale, resources, and global reach, we’ll be able to accelerate our roadmap while continuing to serve and innovate for our customers.”
Arjun Bhatia, an equity analyst with William Blair, said in a report Thursday that the “transaction aligns with Zoom’s M&A strategy and priority of embedding AI more deeply into workflows and advancing its vision of becoming a broader system of action for enterprises.”
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