About Outreach
Outreach was founded in 2014 by Manny Medina, Wes Hather, Andrew Kinzer, and Gordon Hempton, based on the observation that sales representatives, particularly those conducting outbound prospecting and managing many simultaneous deals, needed a more systematic way to plan, execute, and track the many individual touchpoints, including emails, calls, and social media outreach, that a typical sales process to a single prospective customer might involve across weeks or months, since managing this consistently across many prospects simultaneously using only a traditional CRM system's basic activity logging was difficult to do systematically at scale.
Outreach's platform lets sales teams build structured, multi-step outreach sequences that define the specific series of emails, calls, and other touchpoints a sales representative should execute with a given prospect over time, automating scheduling and reminders for each step while still typically requiring a human representative to actually make calls and personalize outreach, and providing analytics that help sales leadership understand which specific outreach sequences, messaging, and cadences are actually most effective at generating meetings and moving deals forward, rather than relying on individual representatives' own inconsistent, personally developed outreach habits and approaches. The company popularized and became strongly associated with the broader "sales engagement platform" software category, a category encompassing tools that help sales teams execute and optimize the specific outbound and follow-up activities involved in the sales process, distinct from customer relationship management systems that more broadly track deal and customer relationship data, and distinct from marketing automation tools focused on broader marketing campaigns rather than individual sales representatives' prospect-specific outreach. Outreach has expanded its platform to include AI-driven capabilities including conversation intelligence analyzing sales calls, deal risk forecasting, and increasingly automated outreach personalization using generative AI. The company's customers span B2B sales organizations across many industries with significant outbound sales development and account executive teams. Outreach has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Premji Invest, Spark Capital, and Sands Capital, reaching a valuation exceeding $4.4 billion, competing primarily with Salesloft in the sales engagement platform category.
