How Crunchbase used Regie.ai to unlock $200K in untapped pipeline in 8 months

Every growing company faces a familiar challenge: how do you maintain momentum when you can't simply just add more people? For Crunchbase — a leader in private company data and market intelligence — this challenge came into sharp focus in early 2024 when they needed to significantly grow pipeline while working with a lean sales development team.

For Crunchbase’s RevOps team, the answer lay not in expanding headcount, but in finding innovative ways to work smarter with the resources they had.

Their solution? Leveraging AI to help them reach the thousands of accounts that weren't getting attention.

This is the story of how Crunchbase partnered with Regie.ai to generate over $200,000 in influenced outbound pipeline and nearly $60,000 in closed-won revenue with no outbound rep effort required — and with their existing headcount intact.

A bit about Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a predictive private company intelligence platform that helps over 80 million dealmakers prioritize and act on the right opportunities using best-in-class company data.

Only Crunchbase has a foundational database that combines AI with uniquely sourced, live private company data and market activity from 80M+ users to deliver personalized private company insights, predictions, and decision-making tools.

Their solutions span the entire market, from self-serve subscriptions for individual users to enterprise-grade APIs for large organizations. Their direct sales team focuses on business and API offerings, working with sales teams, RevOps teams, and financial institutions of varying sizes to help them leverage private company data more effectively.

But even with a robust product suite and clear market fit, Crunchbase faced a common challenge: how could they effectively do more with the headcount they had?

The challenges: Making the most of limited resources

Coming into 2024, Crunchbase was among the many tech companies facing challenges. Market conditions were making it particularly difficult to find customers with budget to spend, and their sales development team was operating at maximum capacity.

1. Limited bandwidth for outbound

With a small SDR team, resources were stretched thin between inbound and outbound prospecting. Despite knowing they needed to grow pipeline, they simply didn't have the human resources to work additional accounts or focus on outbound.

2. Tough market conditions

The market environment in early 2024 made finding net-new customers particularly challenging. The team knew they needed additional pipeline, but traditional outbound methods weren't yielding the results they needed. They faced the difficult task of maintaining growth momentum in an increasingly competitive landscape.

3. Balancing competing priorities

The team was juggling multiple critical objectives:

• Focusing on customer retention
• Growing their existing customer base
• Driving expansion within current accounts
• Finding ways to ramp up their outbound engine

While they had a clear vision of what needed to be done, they lacked the resources to execute effectively on all fronts.

4. Budget constraints

In a time when budget optimization was crucial, the team needed to find ways to consolidate their tech stack and save money while still driving growth. Adding new headcount wasn't an option, so they needed to find creative ways to maximize the impact of their existing team.

The solution: Using AI to do more with less

Crunchbase was no stranger to Regie.ai; the team had already seen strong results using Regie.ai's Co-Pilot product, an AI sales assistant that helped their SDRs create compelling outreach content. But as pipeline needs grew and bandwidth became increasingly more limited, they knew they needed a solution that could help them work more accounts automatically.

Around the same time, Regie.ai launched its newest product: Auto-Pilot. Auto-Pilot offers AI Agents that can autonomously discover, enrich, prioritize, and engage prospects with dynamically generated sequences and outreach. When the Crunchbase team learned about the Auto-Pilot launch, they saw this as the opportunity they’d been looking for to dramatically scale their impact without having to proportionally scale their team.

The team did their due diligence and considered a host of other AI sales platforms in addition to Auto-Pilot. Ultimately, though, they chose to deepen their partnership with Regie.ai over newer entrants for several key reasons:

• Regie.ai’s deep expertise in sales messaging and what actually works;
• Their proven track record in the space;
• Their strong existing partnership with Crunchbase; and,
• Seamless integration with Crunchbase’s tech stack, including its Outreach, Gmail, ZoomInfo, and Demandbase.

What truly set Regie.ai apart, however, was something more fundamental: trust. In an era where new AI sales tools seemed to emerge weekly, the Crunchbase team valued Regie.ai's established presence and proven expertise. While they explored other options, they consistently returned to their existing partnership — one built on demonstrated results and mutual understanding.

"Something that I really appreciated about Regie.ai was the fact that they’ve been doing this for a while. They have that experience. With all these other new companies that are popping up, it’s hard to know just how much knowledge and experience they’d really be able to bring to the table. How much could I trust what they're writing? All of those kinds of questions went into my decision.

“In my evaluation of all these other AI SDR tools - and there are so many - I'd look into it cursorily, maybe take a demo, but I'd never go further. I kept coming back to the trust we had with Regie."

Natalie Maria Blardony York, former senior RevOps manager at Crunchbase

For a team tasked with driving growth amid constraints, this foundation of trust proved more valuable than the novelty offered by less established alternatives.

How it all worked

The team started with a focused approach to Auto-Pilot, setting up their first Agent specifically for cold outbound prospecting. Working closely with their dedicated Regie.ai Customer Success Manager Malena Harrang, they configured the Agent to discover and engage net-new accounts and contacts. Here's how they set up their initial cold outbound Agent:

1. First, they built a reference list of their most successful customer accounts (those with 2+ years of retention) to help the Agent understand ideal target profiles.
2. Using this reference data, the Agent autonomously discovered, sourced, and enriched contacts at similar companies that weren't yet in Crunchbase's database.
3. They excluded current customer accounts to ensure the Agent focused purely on net-new opportunities.
4. Then, they worked with the Regie.ai CS team to update all their personas, which the Agent would then use to inform its content generation work.
5. Finally, they set the Agent to work prospecting these net-new contacts with emails, as well as surfacing a select number of social tasks for the rep.

After seeing strong results from their initial cold outbound Agent, the team looked for other ways Auto-Pilot could support their go-to-market efforts. Working closely with their demand generation team, they expanded their Agent usage to cover a number of specialized campaigns, including:

• Procurement-focused outreach targeting enterprise companies with messaging about consolidating contracts.
• LinkedIn ad retargeting for prospects who had engaged with previous Crunchbase outreach but hadn't responded.
• Outreach to lower-tier accounts that weren't getting attention from AEs.
• High-value prospect campaigns targeting A-scored accounts that weren't owned by any salesperson.
• Targeted outreach to Y Combinator startups — a list of roughly 500 companies — their business development team wanted to pursue but didn't have time to work.

The results: Maximum impact, minimum overhead

The impact was both immediate and substantial. Within 8 months of implementing Auto-Pilot Agents, Crunchbase has seen:

• Over $200,000 in influenced pipeline
• Which meant nearly $50,000-60,000 of their closed-won revenue was influenced by Regie.ai
• Multiple campaigns running simultaneously with minimal operational overhead

The results quickly validated the team's approach. As pipeline surpassed the $60K mark, it became clear that Auto-Pilot was delivering an impressive return on investment — approximately 6x based on their initial calculations.

But the benefits went beyond just numbers. The team saw both direct and indirect impacts from Auto-Pilot's incorporation into their workflow:

• Multi-channel deal influence: Auto-Pilot's outreach influenced deals that ultimately closed through other channels, which showcased the platform's ability to more holistically contribute ROI for the entire organization.
• Broader account engagement: Part of Auto-Pilot's efforts involved multithreading each account; as a result, Crunchbase was able to expand its reach within the account itself and generate engagement from multiple stakeholders — rather than just one or two. This — in turn — created more opportunities for Crunchbase to have more meaningful conversations.‍
• Relevant content that turned heads: Regie.ai's ability to create compelling sales messaging proved to be transformative. When prospects began responding with enthusiasm — one calling it "the best outreach they'd received in a month" — it solidified the team's confidence and trust in the platform. These enthusiastic responses confirmed what they'd hoped: Regie.ai could genuinely create messages that resonated with their prospects at scale.

Keys to success: Smart implementation

The Crunchbase team attributes their success with Auto-Pilot to several key factors:

1. Starting small: They began with a focused approach, targeting non-priority accounts that met specific criteria. The team started by building a contact list based on roles associated with their most successful customer accounts — specifically those that had been with Crunchbase for more than two years.
2. Cross-team collaboration: They worked closely with their demand generation team, particularly on targeted campaigns. For instance, they partnered with their marketing team to create specialized outreach for procurement contacts at enterprise companies, focusing on consolidating self-serve users into enterprise contracts.
3. Building trust gradually: The team's approach to building confidence in the platform was organic. After seeing their first positive responses, the team's trust in the platform solidified, leading to broader adoption.
4. Leveraging existing data: The team made sophisticated use of their CRM data, incorporating custom fields from their Crunchbase enrichment to personalize outreach. This included using data points like the company’s last funding round, total funding, number of investors, and company categories to make messages more relevant and targeted.
5. Strong vendor-customer partnership: The relationship between Crunchbase and Regie.ai's customer success (CS) team proved invaluable. Their CSM Harrang became an extension of Crunchbase's RevOps function, handling the setup and optimization of multiple Agents with minimal input required. The process was remarkably efficient — even with 9-10 Agents running simultaneously, implementation required just 30 minutes of the RevOps team's time. For a lean operation managing revenue functions across the entire organization, this level of support made the difference between success and impossibility.
6. Operational efficiency: The combination of an intuitive platform and strong CS support made it possible for a lean team to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously, without getting bogged down in technical setup or maintenance.

Looking ahead

Building on their success, Crunchbase has ambitious plans to expand their use of Auto-Pilot across multiple teams:

• Inbound optimization: They're working with their CSM to launch an inbound use case in 2025, aiming to improve their lead response and qualification process.
• Customer success enhancement: Plans are in place to create upsell Agents for their own CSMs, marking expansion into post-sale revenue generation as a top priority for the coming year.
• Business development support: The BD team — which currently operates with just four people split between new business and renewals — sees significant potential in using Auto-Pilot to expand their reach. Their initial success with the Y Combinator campaign has opened up possibilities for more targeted startup outreach.

The team’s confidence in these expansion plans stems from their existing results. Specifically, they estimate that without Regie.ai, they would have missed out on roughly $200,000 of pipeline generated during those initial months — opportunities that simply wouldn't have been pursued given their team's bandwidth constraints. 

But the team also recognizes that Auto-Pilot's value extends far beyond the financial numbers: in fact, the platform’s true impact lies in how it’s transformed how their SDRs work, giving them valuable "extra at-bats" without requiring additional time or effort. This shift enabled them to redirect their focus to more strategic activities while Auto-Pilot handled accounts that would have otherwise gone untouched.

Final thoughts

In a world where doing more with less isn't just a goal but a necessity, Crunchbase's story shows what's possible when teams embrace innovation. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for human effort, they saw it as a way to amplify their team's impact — turning thousands of untouched accounts into real opportunities, while also freeing their reps to focus on what they do best.

For the Crunchbase team, success wasn't just about the numbers — though the 6x return on investment certainly validated their approach. It was about finding a way to give their lean team "extra at-bats" without burning them out — proving that, with the right technology and mindset, even the smallest teams can achieve outsized results.