Christopher O'Donnell has a hobby. He loves music and playing guitar, but more than anything, he loves building software. That's why, three years after leaving HubSpot, he built Day.ai, a CRM for the AI era.
Unlike modern CRMs, which are essentially giant spreadsheets that someone needs to enter and keep up to date, Day pulls all the information about an individual from public records like conversations with the company, emails, and LinkedIn.
O'Donnell knows CRMs well: He helped develop HubSpot, one of the most popular CRMs today.
O'Donnell spent over a decade at HubSpot, first helping to power the company's marketing automation solutions before being tapped by founder and former CEO Brian Halligan to build HubSpot's customer relationship management tools, which would go on to become HubSpot's best-known product and ultimately earn O'Donnell the role of Chief Product Officer.
O'Donnell enjoyed his executive role at HubSpot, which is now valued at nearly $30 billion, but missed developing new software. So in 2021, he left HubSpot to work on Arianna Huffington's Thrive while also working on Profitwell, a bootstrapped business he co-founded and sold to Paddle for $200 million in 2022. O'Donnell didn't plan on staying at Thrive for long, which led him to ask himself, “Should I retire?” “I didn't really know what to do,” he said.
And then OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Inspired by this new technology, he started something new and started doing what he really loves: building software.
He reteamed with Michael Pici, his former vice president of sales and product at HubSpot. “Mike's amazing,” O'Donnell says. “There aren't many people who can spend all day with engineers and designers and then turn around and run an entire sales organization.”
The duo felt that advances in generative AI offered the perfect opportunity to build a product they had always “dreamed about.”
In mid-2023, they began developing Day.ai, a CRM powered by generative AI.
“Day is building all this information behind the scenes, and you just ask a question and get an answer,” O'Donnell says. In other words, Day's CRM is automatically learning all the information it needs about people behind the scenes.
This eliminates the need for updates and manual data entry to keep information up to date.
The company is announcing a $4 million seed round led by Sequoia on Thursday.
For now, Day's CRM is available as an invite-only beta, but O'Donnell and Pici have ambitious long-term goals to render the current version of CRM irrelevant.
But don't expect Day to raise any more capital anytime soon — for now, the Sequoia-led round is all the capital the company needs.
“There are four of us on the team. I make minimum wage,” O'Donnell says. “We're very happy. It's fun to start over.”