Every company faces a common challenge: effectively integrating their product updates and roadmaps into timely and up-to-date communications that emphasize value for each unique customer. Customer-facing teams spend countless hours manually gathering data, creating marketing and communication materials, and customizing each for different audiences. By the time these updates are shared, they’re often already outdated.
With the rapid adoption of AI, we’re already seeing the augmentation and replacement of individual functions within an organization. But the next wave of AI-super-charging a company will be at the intersection of cross-functional collaboration and customer engagement, work that today requires dedicated operations professionals (think: sales ops, product ops, business ops) or consumes the time of functional leaders.
This pain point became all too familiar to Berit Hoffmann and Sumeet Pannu during their years building and scaling products at Google, where they witnessed firsthand the tremendous manual effort required to extract data from different functional tech stacks to keep customer-facing teams aligned with product developments. In turn, they founded Korl, an AI-powered platform helping customer success and account teams scale personalized, high-impact interactions that showcase product value, increase retention, and drive expansion.
We’re thrilled to announce that Underscore VC has co-led Korl’s $5M Seed round alongside MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Stage 2 Capital, Perceptive Ventures, and strategic angels including Diane Greene, founder of VMware and former CEO of Google Cloud.
AI-Powered Customer Communications Driving Growth & Engagement
Korl helps companies engage users and grow revenue by revolutionizing how they communicate product value to customers. Their AI-first platform helps customer success and account teams run better QBRs, drive renewals, and unlock revenue growth opportunities by automating tailored presentations and messages that speak to what matters most for each customer.
Through the use of agentic AI, Korl combines product roadmaps (new features, bug fixes, upcoming product launches, etc.) with data about each customer’s specific needs and interests, then packages it into fully contextualized communications — for example: a deck for an upcoming renewal or quarterly business review. All automated. All fully up-to-date.
Just imagine how operating with instantly available, fully customer-contextualized and accurate internal and external communication materials would accelerate your sales cycles, secure renewals, and drive expansion.
The magic of the Korl platform is that it connects to and makes sense of disparate project, product, and customer data sitting in functionally siloed apps like Jira, Figma, and Salesforce. This unified data orchestration layer is crucial for agentic AI, ensuring seamless access to real-time, structured information. Without it, siloed data limits AI’s ability to generate accurate, context-aware outputs. By centralizing product updates, customer interactions, and sales insights, Korl’s AI agents can dynamically retrieve, analyze, and act on relevant information, enabling automation, personalization, and optimized decision-making at scale.
The Path to Korl: A Story of Founder-Market Fit
The Underscore team met the founders of Korl many years ago through the Stanford Graduate School of Business network. We got to know Berit, Korl’s Co-founder & CEO, over time as she became actively engaged with the Underscore Product Core Community. When Korl was ready to raise its first outside capital, we were honored to be their first call.
Berit and Sumeet’s backgrounds make them exceptionally qualified to tackle the pain points they’re solving. Their decade-long collaboration, including years at Google, Salesforce, VMWare, and several high-growth startups, has given them deep insight into the scale and pervasiveness of the problem. The team has already demonstrated their ability to attract top talent, making key early hires from Google and Coda. And their successful beta with companies like Datacamp and Sendoso validates both their vision and execution capabilities.
Looking Ahead
With this new funding, Korl will focus on accelerating marketing and customer acquisition. They’re reimagining how strategic communications and customer growth happen in a post-GenAI world, and we’re excited to support them on this journey!
If you’re interested in being part of this transformation in business communication, we encourage you to request a demo to see their platform in action.
