NoVa’s Data Parrot is bringing generative AI to sales data

For Chris Hamoen, founder and CEO of Alexandria, Virginia’s Data Parrot, the world of generative AI is just getting started.

Hamoen began his career in customer relationship management (CRM), working in marketing, sales and customer success software. From there, he worked at a number of startups, from pre-seed through Series B in revenue operations, product and market growth.

But it wasn’t until he went to a Web3 summit in Portugal that he began trying out generative AI and seeing what it could really do.

“Once I started playing with it, it made me realize: I think we can solve a problem that happens at every single small company that’s trying to grow into a larger company, which is in data and analytics for the go-to-market teams,” Hamoen told Technical.ly.

Currently, Hamoen said, founders and companies are fighting with Salesforce, Hubspot or other third-party tools because there’s too much data to analyze in sometimes not user-friendly models. In some cases, the process might require hiring an outside data analyst.

He believes Data Parrot solves the problem of determining what sales and marketing folks need to care about each day. The app sends a daily email summarizing what went down the day before and, with the help of generative AI, what folks should be jumping on first.

“Small business leaders and even seed, Series A startups, they’re scattered everywhere,” Hamoen said. “Even if you’re running sales, you’re pulled in a million different directions, and often those directions aren’t just literally managing that sales function.”

The app is currently built for Hubspot users and taking feedback from a free model for current users, though he wants to add a Salesforce option as well. There’re about 30 companies using the software today, Hamoen said. The team is still just him and cofounder Ramesh Gupta.

So far, Data Parrot has launched an early-access campaign and is still building out the product. But Hamoen sees the world of generative AI as an interesting space where ChatGPT forced the world to insist upon its release. And in the follow-up, there are tons of new products and startups being created, but he wants Data Parrot to be more than just question-and-answer for companies.

“What’s definitely much more interesting is when you start sequencing problems, solving vertical problems, like what is my forecast?” Hamoen said. “Should I hire another salesperson? What markets should I enter? What are adjacent markets that I should consider looking at? And things like that. That’s not a single question and answer, that’s a thread.”

The company has formally launched, and Hamoen is in the midst of raising a pre-seed round that he wants to keep under $2 million. As the company works on building compatibility with Salesforce, he’ll also likely be adding to the team, though he’s not quite sure of that timeline just yet. The company is also in Cohort 29 of Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH accelerator.

But for now, Hamoen really wants to focus on building out the product, solving the data issue and figuring out all that generative AI can do.

“Salespeople don’t have the time to go and do those deeper dive analyses to look for what really is working? What really is not?” Hamoen said. “I think if we can get close to solving that, that’s going to be pretty incredible.”