Over the past decade, GTM has been a story of democratization. Anyone could build a list using ZoomInfo or Apollo, plug it into Outreach or Salesloft, and spin up thousands of outbound touches overnight. That accessibility changed the distribution curve, but it also collapsed differentiation. Now with the rise of AI SDRs, volume has gone parabolic as entire sequences are being generated and deployed with minimal human effort. Every prospect is bombarded not just by more reps, but by machines that can run 24/7, endlessly iterating on copy and cadence.
In this new environment, the challenge isn’t distribution, it’s precision. Without the right signals, AI-driven outreach just accelerates the noise problem.
The Rise of Data Orchestration
Today, winning teams are cutting through the noise by leveraging novel data sources and creative GTM plays.
They're using data from competitor's social followers (PhantomBuster, TexAu), person-level website visitors (Vector, RB2B), and user sign-ups (Reveal AI). They’re running plays like scraping competitor's LinkedIn followers to find high-intent prospects, identifying website visitors from their top 1,000 target accounts, and enriching user sign-up data to score and identify high-value accounts. These GTM plays are executed with a new generation of tools for email automation (Smartlead, Instantly), LinkedIn automation (Dripify, HeyReach), and CRMs (Hubspot, Salesforce).
The problem is that this new data is often messy, incomplete, and difficult to connect to the various systems of action.
GTM teams need a platform that can:
Enrich contact and company information
Conduct research for qualification and lead scoring
Clean, format, and segment data
Integrate with their diverse systems of action
Enter data orchestration, the connective tissue that sits between your data sources and your GTM tools. It’s what transforms raw, messy data into clean, enriched datasets, ready for action. It's rapidly becoming a critical pillar in the modern GTM tech stack.
The Freckle Thesis: The Power of an Intuitive UI
Clay has been a trailblazer, validating the demand for GTM data orchestration. They've grown incredibly fast, but their product is notoriously intimidating and has a steep learning curve.
A Clay University Youtube tutorial puts it the best: “Trying to learn how to use Clay without guidance is like trying to learn how to use a musical instrument without a teacher. Sure, you can strum around and make some noise but you may never get around to actually making good music.”
As a result, a lot of their growth has been through lead-gen agencies (“Claygencies”) who are more technical and can afford to invest the time to learn the product.
We believe this leaves a massive, underserved opportunity in the market for a more accessible solution. The average in-house GTM team at an SMB or mid-market company is tech-native but not technical. They don’t have the time or desire to invest in a complex product with a steep learning curve. They just want to get to actionable outcomes faster.
This is the classic second-mover opportunity, a playbook we have seen executed to perfection by category leaders like Slack over HipChat, Zoom over WebEx, and Canva over Adobe. These companies won not by being first, but by delivering a radically better user experience and expanding the market through accessibility.
Our investment in Freckle is a bet that user experience can be a category-defining differentiator in a large and expanding category. Freckle is the ultimate mass-market, natural-language alternative to Clay.
Intuitive & accessible: Freckle’s natural-language UI and simple onboarding allows teams to get up and running without expensive agency support.
Simple pricing: Freckle's pricing is standardized to one credit per output, making it easy to forecast spend and use the product without fear of "accidental credit blow-outs," a common pain point with legacy tools.
Focus on the end user: By focusing on the usability needs of in-house GTM teams, Freckle can create a foothold in a key segment of the market and grow with the next generation of businesses.
In less than a year, Freckle has been adopted by more than 2,500 companies. A consistent theme from these customers is the importance of CRM cleanliness. Without accurate, up-to-date records, complex GTM plays like lead scoring, signal-based outbound, PLG expansion, and post-sales automation simply don’t work.
That feedback led the team to lean into the CRM integration (starting with Hubspot) as a clear point of differentiation. Today Freckle enables faster and more sophisticated plays with two-minute sync times compared to 24 hours on Clay. It also gives teams flexibility to query any CRM field, improving usability and making data enrichment easier to operationalize. On top of that, Freckle’s transparent pricing makes adoption more straightforward and predictable.
Perhaps more importantly than all of the above, Nathan embodies the founder archetype we love to back at the seed stage. He’s relentlessly customer-focused, ships with high velocity, and sets the cultural tone for the team. Every feature request is a chance to delight, and (though this might not be very scalable) the team often answers customer questions with a personalized Loom video. That combination of customer empathy and product speed has already built deep trust with users.
It’s been a pleasure to get to know them over the past few months and we’re thrilled to lead their $4M Seed round alongside 1984 Ventures, with participation from Mintaka, Liquid2, and CoVentures.