Sales knowledge automation platform 1up gets a third of its customers from memes

When George Avetisov was the founder and CEO of the cybersecurity startup HYPRhe spent a lot of time in the trenches with the company’s marketing team. He quickly realized that no matter how good his sales team was, they were always pulling in other departments to answer customer questions or fill in technical questions.

“They don’t know the answers to many of the questions that are being asked,” Avetisov told TechCrunch. “They have to ask a sales person, they have to pull a sales engineer. It’s a difficult job, and these people are smart, if I’ve worked with amazing sales people, but the problem with sales is there’s no easy way to create information.”

Avetisov (photo above center) decided that his next problem to solve. He left HYPR in 2021 and took a long break from playing and beating the video game Elden Ring; Avetisov said that he wanted a little break before being eaten by another start. He started his new company, 1 upin 2022.

1up is a knowledge-driven AI platform for sales teams that pulls insights from internal company data and databases. Sales professionals can turn to 1up to find answers to their product or technical questions, provide the information they need and use it to write technical questions.

The company went public in January 2024 and has acquired nearly 100 customers ranging from startups to large customers including WalkMe and Deliveroo. The company was able to bring in a small portion of these customers through a less familiar marketing method: memes.

“We run one of the biggest meme libraries in the world, and we get millions of people on LinkedIn,” Avetisov said. “People follow us from our memes. I know it’s weird, but like, one in three of our leads come from a meme.”

Now the company is announcing a $5 million round of funding led by Upfront Ventures with participation from RRE Ventures, 8-Bit Capital, and the likes of Friendster founder Jonathan Adams, among others. Former senior partner Kobie Fuller is the chief financial officer and will serve on the company’s board.

Fuller told TechCrunch that he received a cold email from Avetisov a few days after one of his companies mentioned that 1up might be a good fit for Fuller’s investment ideas about how AI can transform business processes into information. Speaking about the matter to Avetisov, Fuller said they speak the same language.

“A lot of how we make investment decisions is around the founder and George, the second founder, saw the problem and the first pain,” Fuller said. “When we talk to George, he’s able to get into all kinds of depth or depth that you don’t always see with CEOs. You can tell he’s mission-driven, he’s got a tattoo on his inner arm. He’s really, really into it; he’s very goofy.”

Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI startups for sales departments have exploded, especially when it comes to building AI tools that help customers generate sales leads and reach customers. Companies looking to provide business intelligence, many of which exited before 2022, also began to rise.

However, Avetisov was not deterred. He added that 1up offers a very different service than the leading AI lead generators who don’t think 1up is competing in the same line in the company’s budget. He said that he doesn’t think companies need information centers, but 1up’s approach is different because it solves a specific problem.

“When you talk to business, information management is not a budget thing. It’s not a fire problem,” said Avetisov. “Our view on this is that for knowledge to thrive and become a company or multi-billion dollar industry, it must focus on the individual and the department.”

The next steps for 1up, since they raised the latest investment, is to expand the product team. There will be other changes, though Avetisov wasn’t ready to share details about those.

“Sales teams get more,” Avetisov said. “They have one of the most complex operations in the company, and their tools are terrible. They have a lot of research tools and CRMs and all that stuff. But when it comes to information management, they’ve been completely neglected. So that’s our hot take. That’s our laser focus. “