Unify - Unlocking AI-based GTM Powered by Data for Cursor, Perplexity, Decagon

TLDR - Unify is building the next-gen outbound orchestration platform, sitting on top of CRMs and data enrichment tools to deliver contextual, signal-driven outreach. The company just raised a Series B and has incredible traction, powering the GTM strategy of top firms such as Cursor, Perplexity, and Decagon. It's the company's first time hiring new grads with one potential intern role as well. Inbound interest is significant with a pipeline of already 3,500+ applicants but through The Niche, applicants bypass the inbound to a directed interview with BizOps/Talent lead Haley.

From Campus Insights to Unify

Back in college, I worked in UI/UX Research at a Harvard-based startup called Campus Insights. Founded in 2014 by Riley and Stephen Soward and later acquired by Harvard Student Agencies in 2018, the company branded itself as “fluent in Gen Z,” offering research insights to clients who wanted to better understand young consumers.

But behind the polished website, our outreach was messy, and oftentimes, we were frantically building Instagram scrapers to cold-DM students, compiling student lists, and blasting emails with little personalization. Even as a Gen Z team, reaching Gen Z was hard. Response rates were low, and despite having a strong product, we couldn’t reliably get in front of the right people.

That’s why when I first came across Unify, I was immediately intrigued. Their mission to transform outbound outreach into something more precise, contextual, and effective felt like the solution we desperately needed back at Campus Insights.

My first conversation was with Devin Plumb, one of Unify’s founding engineers. From there, I met Connor Heggie, Unify’s CTO and former ML engineer at Scale AI, whose expertise in data ingestion is foundational to the product. Later, I sat down with Haley Tran, who leads BizOps and Talent, for a deep dive into how Unify is building a new kind of GTM platform.

Go-To-Market as a Marketplace

Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy is the playbook companies use to launch products, reach customers, and scale their business. It covers everything from identifying target audiences and refining value propositions to building sales coverage and pricing strategy. Today, GTM is powered by an increasingly complex tech stack:

At the foundation are customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like Salesforce and HubSpot. These platforms house all of the data around a companies target accounts, customers, contacts, and deals.

CRMs are only as good as the data inside them. That’s where Clay comes in. Clay is effectively a prospecting and enrichment workbench, letting teams access to data sources, run web scrapes, and use AI agents to enrich and personalize outreach at scale. In short, Clay turns messy vendor lists and public web signals into clean, enriched CRM records.

Unify builds on top of these layers by creating a system of action for outbound orchestration. Like Clay, it offers enriched data and personalization, but it goes further by capturing “signals of intent” (e.g., product usage, hiring events, engagement signals, website visits), running multi-channel sequences (email, calls, LinkedIn) with deep personalization, and using AI agents to not just enrich data, but drive action directly.

You can see within the context of Campus Insights how significant a product like Unify would be: the company had a strong value proposition but lacked the tools to reach the right people with the right message. We were manually scraping, blasting emails, and struggling with low response rates. A product like Unify, with its ability to identify intent, enrich contacts, and automate personalized outreach, would have been transformational.

The Data That Powers Unify

At its core, Unify ingests and activates three categories of data to power outbound sales.

First, intent data: these are signals that a prospect or company is likely to buy. Website visits, new hires in key roles, or company changes that indicate readiness in expanding in an area that you as a company sell in. Unify also layers in lookalike signals to suggest similar companies worth targeting. For example, say you are an AI Tech Consultancy platform looking to sell your product and expertise to companies with 500-1000 employees that are located in the Midwest. Unify could not only identify companies within that cohort via lookalike signals but also index upon companies that recently hired more engineering managers or expanded their AI efforts as signals for companies that might be interested in AI Tech Consultancy. Personally, while we at The Niche don’t use Unify, we’ve found increasing success featuring partner startups that just raised significant rounds especially because companies raise rounds to bring in new talent.

Second, contact data: Unify partners with a dedicated network of data providers to offer detailed and personalized insights to outbound and also to ensure that the outbound contact is correct and up-to-date. When asked how Unify ensures data quality amongst their providers, Haley noted that while she is unable to share in-depth the exact process, the company prides itself in rigorously testing data quality before every partnership. Indeed, when the company shipped their lookalikes product, they worked with a variety of data providers before signing with ocean.io because of the quality of data they provided.

Third, customer and CRM data: beyond third-party sources, Unify ingests data directly from a customer’s CRM (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc). This allows sales teams to set up the right rules of engagement, ensuring outreach feels contextual and grounded. By ingesting data through a CRM, Unify ensures that their data pipeline operates by a provisioned and provided context.

Data Flywheel & Moat

Immediately, a couple of questions came to mind as Haley and I discussed Unify’s data strategy. First, is there an opportunity for a data flywheel situation with Unify where as customers run more campaigns, Unify can learn which sequences, roles, and titles land best, feeding insights back into the product. Indeed, Unify already does this, offering users an analytics platform summarizing which types of outbounds, which types of contacts, which sequencing logic for steps in outreach and more land best. Over time, this sequencing intelligence can become a sticky moat.

What about defensibility? If another startup were to partner with the same data providers, how would Unify differentiate itself? Haley’s response was two-prong: first, outreach is notoriously difficult to build. Unify’s “Sequencer” doesn’t just send but it also analyzes and optimizes what’s working, making the product indispensable; second, while they already work with known data providers (Clearbit, 6sense, Ocean.io), Unify plans to expand partnerships to strengthen breadth and accuracy while maintaining strong relations with existing providers.

Not an AISDR

Some startups pitch themselves as AISDRs (AI Sales Development Reps), aiming to fully automate outbound. Haley is quick to clarify: Unify is not trying to replace SDRs. Instead, it’s a system of action designed to empower SDR and BDR teams. The product handles the heavy lifting (qualification, sequencing, and signal analysis) so reps can focus on the high-value human interactions.

Funny enough, when you search for “AISDR” today, Unify shows up as the top result, positioned as the best AISDR alternative.

Team & Hiring

This is the first year Unify is hiring, and the top priority is new grads, with room for an intern depending on timing. The inbound interest is massive with over 3,500 applications already! Thanks to Unify’s partnership with The Niche, applicants from our community will have a chance to interface directly with Haley for expedited review.

The engineering culture is flat and ownership-driven, with full-stack product engineers who both build features and rotate through on-call. Engineers also work very closely with the GTM team, building strong cross-functional relationships and getting real-time product feedback. “We actively dogfood our own product across growth and sales, which means engineers are directly exposed to customer-facing workflows and have a tangible impact on how the company pushes forward.” The team is 60 people with approximately 15-20 engineers now. The company just raised a Series B and is expanding!

Expect an intro screen → project deep dive (success metrics + challenges) → coding (systems or traditional) → cross-functional onsite. To start, you'll first need to be a cohort member of The Niche (determined through your application). As a cohort member, you can then click apply on this company profile.