Former Blameless CEO Ashar Rizqi Joins Silicon Valley Veteran Matt Cooley as Bounti Embarks on Mission to Automate the Customer Journey through AI

Rizqi and Cooley are joined by Lew Cirne, Founder and CEO of New Relic; Cirne is coming onboard as a key investor and first board member

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Bounti, the AI-powered growth OS for companies adapting to the new era of selling, announced today its all-star founding team.

Matt Cooley, a Silicon Valley veteran, and Ashar Rizqi, a respected tech pioneer, both agree: sales prospecting is broken and sales departments are suffering the consequences. Teaming up with perennial innovator and former New Relic CEO Lew Cirne, the three entrepreneurs have founded Bounti because they want to eliminate the time it takes for sales people to creatively engage customers, leads, and prospects.

Bounti leverages AI to radically improve the workflows of salespeople – removing the repetitive and menial tasks, and allowing them to focus entirely on the human work of building relationships and closing.

Ashar is an immigrant founder who came to the US after growing up in Dubai. He was briefly part of the Y Combinator ecosystem through which he launched his first venture Blameless, a company backed by prominent VCs.

In the early stages of founding his second company, Rizqi met Matt Cooley – an established SaaS Executive behind companies such as New Relic, Quip, Mixpanel, and Emotive.

Matt saw something special in Ashar and came on as an investor in 2020, before joining Ashar as a co-founder. The three years they spent together post Cooley's investment saw the formation of a lasting friendship, with an alignment around values that is rare amongst co-founders – but critical in creating not just a great product, but a company and a great company culture.

Together, the two nurtured a shared passion for building a business that was values-driven while also solving a concrete tech problem: salespeople lead lives full of stress, tedium, and blame.

"Sales-led go-to-market motions are massively broken and less profitable than ever," said Cooley, "but not because salespeople aren't talented. They are often skilled and driven people, who are blindly asked to do more with less when annual sales plans break down." 

"These unrealistic expectations on sales to pick up the slack force them into a fury that doesn't allow for them to slow down and be creative in how they interact with prospects and customers. This results in poor value-driven communication. Bounti is fixing that."

Bounti's AI-powered Growth OS preempts reps with upsell, new business and churn signals, providing hyper-personalized next steps directly into a sales team's existing tools.

Bounti enables GTM teams – marketing, enablement, sales, success, ops and product – to act with greater precision, orchestration, alignment, and efficiency. Adopting Bounti leads to more time spent nurturing and actioning the right accounts with the right messaging and playbooks, leading to more effective and productive customer engagement and accelerating revenue growth.

Lew Cirne, Founder and CEO of New Relic, joins Riqzi and Cooley, becoming a key investor and first board member. Lew and Cooley go back a long way, having joined forces at New Relic in 2010 where Cooley was employee #12 – his first time building a global sales organization from the ground up.

"I'm delighted to have the opportunity to work alongside Ashar and Matt," said Cirne. "Ashar has impressed me as an incredible visionary and entrepreneur, and I enjoyed working closely with Matt as he built New Relic's sales from $0 to $100M. For me, I saw a great opportunity to help Ashar and Matt create a rare company and have fun along the way. It reminds me of early New Relic days."

"Bounti is an exciting place to be right now. I see a substantial opportunity for Bounti to help companies of all sizes return to selling by eliminating the mundane work required to drive outbound sales."

Matt and Ashar share a strong alignment not only on product vision but on values, focusing on integrity, kindness, respect, and a growth mindset. This values-based cohesion is foundational to their relationship and the company culture at Bounti – both internally, and in how they communicate with the world.

"Matt, Lew and I have experienced how broken GMT is – not just the tools, but the culture as well. With LLMs and our learnings from DevOps, there is a massive opportunity to truly transform knowledge work for GTM teams and make it better. We're combining that with intentionality around our shared values of being kind, pushing for the best and creating joy for customers to build a special company."

About Bounti
Bounti is the growth operating system for companies adapting to the new era of selling. Adopting Bounti leads to more time spent nurturing and actioning the right accounts with the right messaging and playbooks, leading to more effective and productive customer engagement and accelerating revenue growth. 

Media Contact for Bounti:
Maria Jordan
PR manager
pr@bounti.ai
+44 7572 543599

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SOURCE Bounti