Origami raises $2M to find your perfect customers with Agents

Announcements

·

01/15/2025

Pictured: Finn Mallery and Kenson Chung, Co-Founders

Written By: Kenson Chung

Finn and I are thrilled to announce Origami Agents' $2M Seed round, backed by an incredible group of builders—including Shopify's COO and the founders of Yext, BloomTech, LayerZero, Fizz, along with dozens of others.

We founded Origami Agents in September 2024, betting everything on our shared vision for workforces built on AI agents. But the real story started with a chance meeting three years ago.

Our Story

A hackathon brought me from London to the United States, where Finn and I worked together on a number of projects. For the next three years, we worked side by side on our separate startups, but kept gravitating back to building in go-to-market.

In 2021, Finn joined Fizz just after the founders launched at Stanford from their dorm rooms, working on the go-to-market team as they raised over $40 million over the next two years. 

Meanwhile in London, I joined an enterprise outbound automation startup during my first year of college. Starting as an engineer, I built out their core infrastructure before becoming the CTO, leading the engineering team to serve billion-dollar European enterprises.

Over the next few years, Finn and I independently worked closely with dozens of B2B outbound sales teams, creating custom AI workflows to help them land higher quality customers. 

A clear pattern emerged: teams were either spending 30+ hours weekly on manual research, or turning to quick fixes like AI SDRs and mass automation. These spray-and-pray approaches were backfiring—alienating prospects who weren't ready and frustrating those who were never a fit in the first place.

But everything changed with the rise of AI agents. Instead of choosing between never-ending manual research or spray-and-pray automation, teams could now deploy intelligent systems that browse the web just like humans to find their perfect-fit customers.

We knew this was our moment. So, a week before the academic year began, I called Finn, and we decided to go all in. He left his Stanford Master's program, and I dropped out of my second year at UCL. 

The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to San Francisco, carrying just a tourist visa and high school diploma. Our mission was clear: build AI research agents sophisticated enough to work as true team members.

We arrived in San Francisco with a blank canvas—no product, no customers—but a clear vision. Within days of landing, we applied to Y Combinator and were building at full speed.

We designed our agents' technical architecture with one key principle: they would be self-learning, just like a real team. But unlike humans, they never repeat mistakes once given feedback.

Three weeks after starting YC, we launched our beta, using our own agents to find our initial customers. 

It was a massive hit—our first three customers (TouchSuite, Loop, and Stellar) loved the agents so much, they all became investors. Finn took over 500 sales calls in three months while I was pulling all-nighters to keep building the product.

In our first 50 days, we scaled from $0 to $50k MRR, as the fastest growing company in our batch, using our own agents to scale.

Our Future

While our first agents have been used for sales research, we're building something much bigger. Our agents' research capabilities are already being used for nearly every aspect of go-to-market: from ABM and sentiment analysis in marketing to identifying upsell opportunities in customer success, to building lists for recruiting. 

As they learn and evolve, diving deep into each customer's business, our agents become invaluable teammates—uncovering opportunities that humans miss and scaling these functions by orders of magnitude.

Bringing this vision to life wouldn't be possible without our early believers. We're incredibly grateful to those who have supported us along the way, and excited to keep building alongside our amazing team, customers, and investors as we continue pushing the boundaries of what AI agents can do.


- Kenson Chung, Co-Founder