Across AI, a new company pioneering Agentic AI for enterprise workflows, announced it has raised an oversubscribed seed round to bring to market the industry’s first enterprise sales AI supported by next-generation agentic memory. The funding was co-led by Village Global (a venture firm backed by some of the most successful entrepreneurs, including Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt, and chaired by Reid Hoffman) and also co-led by early Dropbox investor Bobby Yazdani at Cota Capital.
Across AI’s technology is based on years of academic research. It analyzes internal and external enterprise data to provide accurate, verifiable insights and actionable recommendations for entire business workflows, starting with enterprise sales.
Despite AI advances, supporting complex enterprise workflows remains a challenge. And the current approaches struggle to understand the context and relationships within enterprise data. Techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are useful for answering factual questions. Still, they treat all data equally and cannot prioritize, reason over, or adapt to new and changing information. These limitations prevent existing solutions from reliably performing the high-level reasoning needed to transform enterprise workflows.
Across AI’s technology addresses these challenges with a dynamic memory system purpose-built to support complex workflows. And unlike first-generation knowledge retrieval systems, Across AI’s memory continuously adapts, retaining just the relevant information, discarding outdated data, and surfacing key insights based on contextual importance. This enables Across AI’s agentic AI apps to reason over unstructured enterprise data within each workflow step by using a proprietary combination of LLMs and workflow-specific algorithms.
Across AI tackles these challenges with Agentic apps that support sales teams across each sales stage and are built for multi-step workflows. These apps synthesize data into higher-level reasoning, which is used to perform accurate actions such as generating a document.
This is the founding team:
1.) Steven Mih, CEO and co-founder, is a repeat entrepreneur with decades of enterprise sales experience. He was previously the co-founder and CEO of Ahana Cloud, which was acquired by IBM in 2023. Steven has led successful startups as the former CEO of Aviatrix and has led sales teams at Couchbase, Transitive, and Cadence.
2.) Dr. Niloufar Salehi, CPO and co-founder, is an AI industry-known researcher in human-centered AI. She has led groundbreaking research on AI system design as a professor at UC Berkeley, shaping how AI can be integrated into complex workflows to boost reliability and augment human capabilities.
3.) Dr. Afshin Nikzad, CTO and co-founder, is a specialist in advanced algorithms and machine learning models. He is a dual PhD recipient from Stanford University, a competitive programming gold medalist, and is on leave from his professorship at the University of Southern California (USC). His expertise enables Across AI’s agents to process and understand nuanced contexts and provide actionable insights that adapt to new information in real-time.
Based on UC Berkeley research and NSF grants, this team is uniquely positioned to tackle the critical challenges in today’s sales technology landscape.
KEY QUOTES:
“Having carried a quota for 18 years, I’ve lived the daily challenges salespeople face. Throughout my career, deep product and account knowledge gave me an edge in prospect conversations but took an enormous amount of time. As a sales manager, I depended on each team member to build a pipeline and execute processes at the highest level. We started Across AI to build the solution I always wished I had—that understands the context of my deals and has the collective knowledge of my sales team to assist me with expert-level strategy and tactics.”
– Steven Mih, CEO and Co-founder of Across AI
“At Village Global, we are dedicated to supporting innovative AI startups that address significant industry challenges to AI adoption. Across AI’s “enterprise-grade AI” can meaningfully reduce the hours sales professionals and sales managers spend updating pipelines, customizing pitches, benchmarking competitors, and manually advancing deals to closure.”
– Anne Dwane, Partner and Co-founder of Village Global, which co-led the seed round
“Having been an early investor in Google, Dropbox, and many leading-edge enterprise technology startups, I closely follow the evolution of the enterprise technology landscape. Across AI’s innovative agentic AI technology understands and leverages business-critical enterprise data and has the potential to transform how businesses work across the entire sales cycle. Cota is excited to support Across AI’s visionary team on this groundbreaking journey.”
– Bobby Yazdani, Founder and Managing Partner of Cota Capital, which co-led the seed round
