Sprouts.ai, a Palo Alto-based startup building AI agents for enterprise revenue teams, has raised US$9 million in pre-Series A funding, as investors continue to back software companies trying to automate parts of the B2B sales and marketing stack.

The round was co-led by True Global Ventures and Accel, with participation from Kickstart Ventures, the corporate VC arm associated with the Philippines’ Ayala group. The new round brings Sprouts.ai’s total funding to US$14 million.

Also Read: AI agents are already inside your systems, but who’s controlling them?

Founded in 2023 by Karan Chaudhry, Kapil Chaudhry, and Avinash Nagla, Sprouts.ai is building what it calls a Deep AI GTM Engine. The platform combines customer intelligence, account data, buyer committee mapping, relationship networks, product heatmaps, complex search, and AI-powered workflows to help enterprises identify, engage, and convert target customers.

The company says the funding will go towards improving its AI agent capabilities, deepening enterprise integrations, and expanding its platform.

A bet on AI-native sales infrastructure

Sprouts.ai is entering a crowded but active category: B2B revenue technology. For years, enterprise sales and marketing teams have stitched together customer relationship management systems, enrichment databases, sequencing tools, analytics dashboards, marketing automation software, and intent-data products. The result is often expensive, fragmented, and heavily dependent on manual data cleaning.

“The B2B revenue stack is broken. Sales and marketing teams operate across more than 20 tools, work off dirty data, and bolt AI on top of infrastructure that was never built for it,” said Karan Chaudhry, Co-founder and CEO of Sprouts.ai. “We built Sprouts.ai to replace that fragmentation with a unified data and agent layer that actually moves the pipeline.”

The pitch is timely. Enterprises are under pressure to show practical returns from generative AI after two years of experimentation. Revenue operations is one of the obvious targets: sales teams generate large volumes of structured and unstructured data, but much of it sits across CRM systems, email, call transcripts, spreadsheets, and third-party tools.

Sprouts.ai says its software connects with enterprise systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, as well as large language models including Claude. It aims to help teams move from prospecting and account research to workflow execution inside the systems they already use.

The company claims customers using its platform have reported a threefold increase in ideal customer profile-qualified leads, a 25 per cent lift in sales qualified leads, a threefold improvement in response rates, and a 35 per cent reduction in GTM tooling costs. These figures are company-provided and have not been independently verified.

Also Read: When AI agents start acting on our behalf, security gets more complicated

Its customers include Razorpay, Hewlett Packard, HighRadius, and Udemy.

The opportunities in Southeast Asia

Although Sprouts.ai is headquartered in Palo Alto, the Southeast Asian angle is not incidental. Kickstarts’s participation gives the company a regional investor with links to one of the Philippines’s largest conglomerates, and the problem Sprouts.ai is trying to solve is visible across the region.

Southeast Asia’s enterprises operate in fragmented markets with different languages, regulations, buyer behaviours, and levels of digital maturity. A regional B2B sales team may need to map accounts across Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, each with uneven public company data, inconsistent job-title structures, and different procurement norms.

This makes generic global go-to-market databases less useful than they appear on a slide. Many international sales intelligence tools have stronger coverage in North America and Europe than in Southeast Asia, where company registries, SME data, buyer contacts, and intent signals can be patchier.

Data readiness is also a broader barrier to AI adoption. Cisco’s 2024 AI Readiness Index found that only 13 per cent of organisations globally were fully ready to capture AI’s potential, with data infrastructure and governance among the main constraints. For Southeast Asian enterprises, those gaps are often compounded by legacy systems, business-unit silos, and markets where offline relationships still shape B2B sales.

That is the opening Sprouts.ai is targeting: not simply another sales tool, but an intelligence layer that can make AI agents useful because the underlying account and buyer data is cleaner.

“We’re entering an age where the businesses that win will be the ones who truly understand who their customers are,” said Joan Yao, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures. “As AI agents take on more of the work of finding, understanding, and engaging the right customers, that data advantage is what will set Sprouts.ai apart.”

Competition is already intense

Sprouts.ai will not have the market to itself. The B2B sales intelligence and revenue operations category includes established global players such as ZoomInfo, 6sense, Demandbase, Apollo.io, Lusha, Cognism, and Clearbit, now part of HubSpot. Clay has also gained attention among growth teams for combining data enrichment, prospecting workflows, and AI-assisted outbound execution.

Also Read: Adapting to the new B2B sales landscape: AI and beyond

Large enterprise software vendors are also moving down the same path. Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and Adobe are embedding AI assistants and automation into their revenue clouds and marketing suites. That creates a difficult strategic question for startups: can they build a defensible intelligence layer, or will incumbents absorb similar capabilities into existing enterprise contracts?

Sprouts.ai’s answer appears to be data depth and agentic execution. Instead of selling only a database or workflow tool, the company is positioning itself as a unified GTM intelligence layer that sits across the full funnel, from ideal customer profile definition to closed-won deals.

The approach could appeal to enterprises that are already paying for multiple revenue tools and now face pressure to rationalise software spending. It could also resonate in markets such as Southeast Asia, where companies want AI adoption but may not have the internal data quality required to deploy autonomous workflows reliably.

Funding follows a broader AI shift

The round also reflects a broader shift in venture capital. Investors are no longer backing generative AI only at the foundation-model layer. Capital is flowing into applied AI companies that target specific enterprise functions, including customer support, software development, legal operations, finance, HR, and sales.

For this part of the world, this is particularly relevant. The region is unlikely to produce many companies competing directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, or xAI at the infrastructure layer. But applied AI companies that solve local enterprise pain points may have a clearer path to adoption.

Google, Temasek, and Bain have estimated Southeast Asia’s internet economy at hundreds of billions of US dollars in gross merchandise value, but enterprise software adoption remains uneven across markets. That leaves room for vertical and workflow-specific AI products, particularly in areas where local data, integrations, and compliance requirements matter.

Sprouts.ai’s challenge will be to prove that its platform can deliver measurable revenue outcomes beyond early customer claims. Enterprise sales software is a category full of tools that promise better leads and cleaner workflows. Buyers will want evidence that AI agents can improve pipeline generation without creating compliance risks, inaccurate outreach, or another layer of software complexity.

Also Read: AI lead generation for B2B sales: A practical guide

For now, the company has secured credible investors and a problem large enough to justify attention. The harder part begins after the funding: showing that AI-native revenue operations can move from boardroom talking point to repeatable enterprise deployment, including in messy, multilingual, and data-fragmented markets such as Southeast Asia.

The post Sprouts.ai raises US$9M to build AI revenue agents for enterprise sales teams appeared first on e27.

The post Why US$1.4 billion in Bitcoin longs could drag Bitcoin down to US$53,500? appeared first on e27.

Talk to anyone in sales, marketing, or ops long enough, and the CRM conversation runs in a loop.

First, it’s “why are we paying this much for a system that basically does nothing?” Then the company adopts a new platform, and for a quarter or two there’s relief: the pipeline is clean, reports actually load, the rep dashboard is in one place.

Then come the integrations, the custom fields, the dashboards nobody asked for. A year later: “Why are we paying this much for a system that basically does nothing?”

The cycle keeps repeating because the conversation about CRM has been stuck in the wrong place. CRM, when it actually works, is one of the most useful pieces of software a company can buy. It pulls a sales team, a marketing team, customer success, and finance into the same set of facts about the same set of customers.

When it doesn’t work, it becomes the most expensive spreadsheet a company has ever owned.

The misconceptions that keep teams stuck

A few ideas about CRM survive longer than they should.

CRM is only for big corporations

Salesforce’s enterprise pricing set this expectation a decade ago, and it stuck even as smaller, more flexible products moved the floor.

A five-person team selling a US$40,000 product has every reason to track pipeline the way an enterprise team does. The math just runs differently. The era of paying enterprise prices for a CRM that barely does anything for you is over.

CRM is just a fancy contact database

This one is fading, but not fast enough. To some, CRM is still just a fancy contact database, a place where you keep all your connections stored but never actually take action on the leads you have.

Here’s where the difference shows up:

A contact list answers “who do we know?” A CRM answers “what should happen next, and who should do it?”

A contact list might only give you a name, a phone number, and an email. A CRM tells you what to do with that phone number, what emails to send, when to follow up, and how.

CRM is only for the sales team

Sales is where most companies start. But the record of who a customer is, what they bought, when they last talked to someone, and what they need next is also the foundation that marketing campaigns, support tickets, renewal forecasts, and finance reconciliation sit on top of.

Treating CRM as a sales-only tool turns every other team into a guest in someone else’s house. CRM systems are most helpful when they’re used across departments, all at once. Your marketing team logs prospects and assigns tasks, checking off requirements. Your sales team reaches out with outbound emails, runs cold calls or cold messaging sequences, and follows up on each action. Your legal team chimes in to check contracts and documents, calculate efforts, and break down costs.

And the list goes on.

Also Read: The problem with ‘PM as CEO of the Product’: A myth that hurts more than helps

Where most CRMs actually break down

Spend a few minutes on r/CRM, and the same complaints come up across companies, industries, and team sizes.

One recent thread on optimisation is a useful catalogue. The patterns, however, are remarkably consistent.

Data clutter and overcomplication

Most CRMs try to do everything, and the result is a homepage with seventeen widgets, a contact record with forty fields, and a sales rep who logs activity into one or two of them and ignores the rest.

And we haven’t even mentioned duplicate data. Duplicate records stored in your CRM lead to confusion, and they can seriously mess with your sales process. In fact, 15 per cent to 25 per cent of the data in a CRM is often duplicated. On top of that, 40 per cent of sales reps say they lack the data needed to effectively target leads.

The system optimises for completeness. The team optimises for getting through the day.

Too many clicks, too little flow

Logging a call should only take ten seconds.

For some reason, in most CRM platforms, it takes four clicks, two dropdowns, a free-text field, and a save button that occasionally fails silently. Multiply that across every rep and every interaction in a week, and you can predict where the data will be in six months: incomplete and quietly distrusted by everyone who relies on it.

Your CRM should work for you, in the most optimised way, on your own timeline. Spending real effort on what should be a simple, mundane task is not the goal of a CRM at all.

Expensive for what you actually use

CRM pricing has crept up faster than CRM functionality for years, partly because vendors keep moving features into higher tiers, and partly because the integrations and add-ons that make a platform usable get priced separately. Teams pay for the base seat, then again for analytics, then again for marketing automation, then again for the enrichment plugin that cleans up the data they were paying to enter.

So how much are we actually spending on CRM? It’s a question with no clean answer, because the add-on fees and extra tool charges keep piling on.

Choosing a CRM that holds up

A CRM you’ll still respect a year from now isn’t picked by a feature checklist. Features can always be upgraded, replaced, or even downgraded. What matters is what the CRM actually does for you, the customer journey it supports end-to-end, and whether it holds up in the long run beyond the flashy features.

Pick AI-native, not AI-bolted-on

A newer generation of CRMs has been built around the assumption that enrichment, summarisation, and follow-up drafting are part of the platform, not bolt-ons. That changes what a sales rep does in a typical hour. Less typing and less hunting for context, more time on the conversation. If a CRM still treats AI as a marketing slogan rather than a workflow primitive, the gap between it and the AI-native category will widen every quarter.

A real free trial, not some “14-day free demo”

Most free trials show a polished demo path and lock the rest behind a sales call. Ask for the full surface area before you sign. A platform that won’t let you stress-test it is telling you something about how confident the team is in the product outside of guided tours.

Check out everything the CRM has to offer. The question isn’t “can this CRM send a follow-up email?” The better one is “how many native integrations does this have to the systems my team already uses, and can I configure them without an admin certification?” Heavy manual overhead is usually a sign that the integrations were an afterthought.

Also Read: The systemic minimum effective dose: Redesigning productivity through precision

Audit the data, weekly or bi-weekly

CRM data decays. People change jobs, companies rebrand, deals stall and never get closed or lost properly. A short-standing review keeps the system trustworthy. A platform that surfaces stale records on its own, without a manual report, removes the meeting altogether.

Usability decides whether the rollout works

This is the unglamorous criterion and the one that quietly decides whether a CRM rollout works. If the interface is clunky, adoption stalls, and any feature on the brochure becomes irrelevant. The cleanest test is a five-minute walkthrough with a rep who didn’t pick the tool. Watch where they hesitate.

If you’re evaluating a CRM right now, the choice worth optimising for is AI-native and consolidated. Alano is one example of the category, designed so that a single workspace handles enrichment, outreach, and pipeline management without an integration layer between them. The point isn’t that any one product solves everything. It’s that consolidation has stopped being a “nice to have” and started being the difference between a CRM that earns its seat cost and one that doesn’t.

What CRM looks like next

The interesting shift in the next two years won’t be about features. It will be about who or what is doing the work inside the CRM.

The current model still assumes a person types most of what gets recorded and reads most of what gets reported. The next model assumes an agent is doing both. A call ends; the summary, the contact updates, the deal-stage change, and the follow-up draft are already in the record by the time the rep opens their laptop. Pipeline reviews stop being a weekly cleanup of bad data and start being a real conversation about strategy. Marketing stops asking sales for the latest contact list and starts triggering plays from the same source of truth.

That’s the version of CRM worth waiting for, and it’s the version a handful of platforms are quietly building toward right now. The companies that get the most out of it will be the ones that stop accepting friction as the cost of doing business and start asking, every quarter, the question this whole category should have been built around in the first place.

—

The post The future of CRM: AI-native, consolidated, and frictionless appeared first on e27.

Atome Philippines has secured a PHP 5 billion (~US$88 million) wholesale facility from Asia United Bank, giving the digital finance platform local-currency funding to expand its consumer credit business in one of Southeast Asia’s most underbanked large markets.

The facility will mainly support the Atome PayLater Anywhere Card, which the company says has now been issued to more than three million Filipinos.

Also Read: Atome lines up US$345M debt as Southeast Asia fintechs shun equity

According to Atome, up to 80 per cent of cardholders are first-time card users, while 65 per cent are women. Most use the card for recurring household spending, including groceries, food, household items, telecoms bills and utilities.

That usage profile matters. In the Philippines, credit access remains thin outside the traditional banking system, especially beyond Metro Manila. While digital payments have grown rapidly, formal credit penetration still lags behind demand, leaving fintech lenders, buy-now-pay-later operators and digital banks competing to serve consumers who are financially active but underserved by incumbent lenders.

Local funding for a local credit business

For Atome, the AUB facility adds a sizeable peso-denominated line to its funding base. That is more than a balance-sheet detail. Consumer lenders operating across Southeast Asia often face currency mismatch risks when they raise capital in US dollars but lend in local currency. A domestic funding line can help reduce that exposure, improve pricing discipline and support more predictable expansion.

Atome said adoption of its card has expanded beyond Metro Manila into Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The company’s wider product portfolio in the Philippines includes lending, savings and insurance, positioning it less as a single-product BNPL provider and more as a digital finance platform targeting mass-market consumers.

“The closing of AUB’s PHP 5 billion facility validates Atome’s market position and delivers competitive, PHP-denominated funding at meaningful scale,” said Christian Quiros, President and Country Manager of Atome Philippines.

AUB framed the transaction as part of its support for fintech platforms operating within formal credit standards. “This partnership advances financial inclusion while maintaining rigorous credit standards,” said Ernesto Uy, Executive Vice President and Account Management Head at AUB.

Also Read: Atome defies market headwinds with 63 per cent income surge, US$4B GMV run rate

The phrasing is notable because BNPL and embedded credit players across the region have had to work harder to distinguish responsible lending from unchecked consumer credit growth. Regulators in markets such as Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia have tightened scrutiny of lending disclosures, affordability checks and debt collection practices, even as they recognise that digital lenders can broaden access where banks have limited reach.

The Philippines remains a large inclusion opportunity

The Philippines has become one of Southeast Asia’s more active digital finance markets, driven by high smartphone usage, a young population, and persistent gaps in banking access. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has reported strong growth in digital payments, with electronic transactions accounting for more than half of retail payment volumes in recent years. The central bank has also set financial inclusion as a core policy priority, particularly for women, micro-entrepreneurs and consumers outside major urban centres.

Still, access to credit remains uneven. Many Filipinos have digital wallets but limited access to formal revolving credit, cards or instalment products. That gap has created room for companies such as Atome, Billease, Home Credit Philippines, GCash-linked lending products, Maya, SeaMoney and other app-based lenders to build credit relationships with consumers who may not qualify for traditional bank cards.

The competitive field is crowded. Home Credit has long focused on point-of-sale consumer finance, particularly electronics and appliances. Billease has built a local BNPL and consumer lending business. GCash and Maya benefit from large wallet ecosystems and payments data. Regional players such as SeaMoney and Kredivo, meanwhile, have used e-commerce, payments and risk-scoring capabilities to push deeper into credit.

Atome’s card-led approach gives it a different route to consumer adoption. Instead of limiting usage to partner merchants or online checkouts, a PayLater card can become part of daily spending behaviour. That also raises the stakes on underwriting. Everyday-use credit products can scale quickly, but they need disciplined credit limits, repayment monitoring and collection practices if they are to avoid overextension among first-time borrowers.

BNPL evolves beyond checkout financing

Atome started as a BNPL platform but, like several players in the sector, has moved into a broader financial services model. That reflects the economics of the category. Pure BNPL margins can be pressured by merchant fees, funding costs, fraud risk and repayment behaviour. Platforms that can cross-sell lending, cards, savings or insurance may be better positioned to improve customer lifetime value, although they also face heavier regulatory and operational demands.

Across Southeast Asia, the BNPL sector has shifted from aggressive merchant acquisition to more disciplined credit growth. Rising interest rates over the past few years made wholesale funding more expensive, forcing lenders to pay closer attention to unit economics and asset quality. Investors have also become less tolerant of growth driven primarily by subsidies.

This is why the AUB facility is strategically useful for Atome. A large local bank facility suggests a degree of institutional confidence in its Philippine book, although the ultimate test will be portfolio performance as card usage expands beyond early adopters and urban customers.

Also Read: Atome secures US$75M facility to expand BNPL reach in Philippines

Atome is part of Singapore-headquartered Advance Intelligence Group, which is backed by investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Warburg Pincus, Northstar and EDBI. The group operates across digital finance and risk technology, and Atome remains one of its more visible consumer brands in Southeast Asia.

For AUB, the deal gives it exposure to a fast-growing fintech credit channel without having to originate every end-borrower relationship directly. For Atome, it supplies domestic liquidity at scale in a market where demand for accessible credit is real, but where regulatory tolerance will depend on whether lenders can prove they are expanding access without encouraging unsustainable debt.

The Philippine opportunity is significant, but not uncontested. The next phase of growth will likely be defined less by card issuance numbers and more by repayment quality, customer retention and whether digital lenders can serve first-time borrowers without repeating the excesses seen in less regulated consumer credit markets.

The post Atome’s US$88M AUB facility tests the next phase of Philippine BNPL appeared first on e27.

I want to tell you about a number that should make every climate founder in Southeast Asia angry.

US$37 billion.

That’s the combined JETP commitment across Indonesia and Vietnam alone. Indonesia signed for US$21.6 billion. Vietnam signed for US$15.5 billion. These aren’t projections or targets. These are commitments. Money that governments and international partners put their names on specifically to accelerate the climate transition in this region.

Now tell me how many founders you know who’ve seen a dollar of it.

I’ll wait.

The gap nobody is talking about

There’s a version of the SEA climate story that looks great on paper. Policy scaffolding going up. Carbon taxes rising. ASEAN sustainable finance taxonomy finally giving investors a common language. International capital showing interest. Conference panels full of optimistic people in linen shirts.

And then there’s the version on the ground.

Founders pitching VCs because they don’t know any other door exists. Climate ventures structured wrong for the instruments available. Development finance sitting in disbursement queues while startups run out of runway. A US$37 billion commitment slowly moving through bureaucratic channels while the companies that should be receiving it are busy preparing their fifteenth investor deck.

The money is not missing. The translation layer is.

Also Read: Funded: I keep a notebook by my bed with one question about SEA climate

Why the capital isn’t moving

JETP money doesn’t flow like VC money. It moves through governments, multilateral institutions, development banks, and implementing agencies before it ever gets close to a founder. Each layer has its own compliance requirements, reporting standards, and risk appetite. By the time it reaches the ground, it looks nothing like what a climate startup can actually absorb.

Development finance institutions want projects at a certain scale. Foundations want specific proof points. Grant programmes want reporting frameworks that most early-stage founders have never heard of. The instruments being offered and the ventures trying to receive them are speaking completely different languages.

This is not a criticism of the institutions. They’re doing exactly what they were designed to do. The problem is that nobody is sitting in the middle translating.

What the best climate funds understand

The funds that have stayed consistent in the SEA climate, and there are very few of them, understand one thing clearly. Commercial viability and emissions impact are not in conflict. The best climate companies create real economic value for their customers first. The impact follows from the business working, not the other way around.

That framing is what makes a climate venture legible to multiple capital sources simultaneously. A venture that creates genuine value can absorb VC, attract development finance, qualify for catalytic grants, and access JETP-linked programmes. But only if it’s structured correctly from the start.

Most aren’t. Not because the founders are wrong. Because nobody showed them the full map.

Also Read: Funded: AI is having its moment, climate is having a crisis. SEA can’t afford to confuse the two

The US$37 billion translation problem

Here’s what the translation layer actually looks like in practice.

A climate founder in Indonesia building in solid waste or energy efficiency has potential access to multiple capital sources. JETP-linked programmes for energy transition. Foundation capital for proof of concept. Development finance for scale. Equity for growth. Each instrument has a different entry point, different evidence requirements, different timeline.

A founder who sequences these correctly can build a genuinely well-capitalised company without giving away equity too early, without taking on the wrong kind of debt, and without spending two years pitching VCs who were never the right fit to begin with.

But the sequencing requires someone who knows all the rooms. Most founders only know one.

The real opportunity

US$37 billion committed to SEA climate is not a problem. It’s an infrastructure waiting for founders who know how to access it and intermediaries who know how to connect them.

The next wave of SEA climate companies won’t be built by founders who pitched their way to a VC term sheet. They’ll be built by founders who understood the full capital landscape, sequenced it intelligently, and used the right instrument at the right stage.

The money is already here. It has been for a while.

The question is who’s going to help founders find the door.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.

The post Funded: US$37 billion was promised to SEA climate, where did it go? appeared first on e27.