Everything I measured in AI x GTM -- September report

Three months ago I left my CMO job and went independent. In August I registered Adam’s GTM Company LLC. In September we crossed 20,000 subscribers (thank you!!), sold out partnerships, soft launched the GTM Creator Index, and shared 7,135 Dreamforce and UNBOUND posts as an open dataset (built using Apify + Jev).

I’m having a lot of fun building and analyst-ing in this space.

This monthly report is one of the systems I’m working to improve with each agent loop. I’d love any feedback you have on this edition. Just hit reply. I read ‘em all.

In September I logged 73 GTM-relevant moves: 8 acquisitions, 11 funding deals, 48 product launches, 2 strategic moves, and 4 revenue milestones. I also measured the conversation across a panel of 20,000+ AI x GTM posts. Live market tracker here.

Let’s start high level. Four themes piqued my interest.

When the big labs ship, the world reacts. Let’s see how that hype shows up in the GTM conversation.

In my book, Jev is the most interesting GTM-relevant story. Amongst the trillion-dollar labs shipping to much fanfare, Jev was hot in GTM. As of this report it’s showing up in 5.6% of the GTM conversation I track since its Sept. 15 launch and has sustained interest at higher levels than the big names.

Overall the Foundation Models topic jumped from 6.9% of the conversation in August to 10.9% in September with all the launch activity. Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Sonnet 5.5, and folded Cowork into Claude. OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, then Sol and Luna. SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.7, and Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash.

I tested Jev on 7,135 LinkedIn posts from Dreamforce and UNBOUND. I spent $1.35 on 193K classifications (mostly to seem cool). I love the combo of Apify + Jev. Here’s my build kit if you want to try something similar.

Up the stack, personal agents are the rage in broader consumer circles. It’s showing up in GTM land too. Personal Agents doubled its share of the conversation in September, to 1.6%. Grok Bot is the most sales-oriented: SpaceXAI is pitching them to sales teams with connections to Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, Clay, and Granola. I love their approach, but I’ve decided it’s not for me right now.

Meta’s Muse, Instinct, and Town are taking over the internet. Steve Hind called them “the fastest growing consumer product since ChatGPT.” Instinct raised $1B at a $10B valuation on Sept. 28, just a month after raising $250M at a $2.5B valuation, and it only launched its invite-only service in August! Then on Sept. 29, OpenAI launched dots, always-on agents that work across 4,000+ apps in ChatGPT. The launch post drew 11× OpenAI’s usual response.

I’m still asking where my investment in AI accumulates: in someone else’s app, or in context and workflows I can keep using as the models improve?

I’ve been whining about the lack of AI progress in GTM all year. In January I was disappointed in AI products for GTM, with no Cursor for sales yet. In February, support, dev tools, and legal had AI breakouts, and Harvey alone was worth more than all AI-native GTM companies combined. As recently as Sept. 5, the AI-era unicorns in pure-play GTM were just Clay and Profound. But I kept betting 2026 is GTM’s year.

September delivered some of it. Clay raised $115M at a $7.1B valuation. Six days later, Profound raised $180M at $1.8B. James Cadwallader’s announcement drew 63× his usual response, the biggest founder spike I measured all month. Lightfield raised $47M to build “the CRM for companies that run on agents.” Firecrawl raised $75M for the GTM developer tools layer.

The milestones came in too. Viktor, an AI coworker for growth, hit $50M in ARR just 7 months after launch. Higgsfield crossed a $1B annualized run-rate. It’s creative infrastructure that is re-shaping the marketing space.

Everyone in GTM tech should be happy about this, even the companies competing with each other. More founders and more investment give GTM teams more options. I’m still betting AI x GTM accelerates.

Context engineering has been a big topic in AI since June 2025, when Tobi Lütke and Andrej Karpathy argued it should replace prompt engineering (Simon Willison has the exchange). In December, Foundation Capital called context graphs AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity.

From January to June it was a hot topic with GTM builders, Jared Waxman, Nico Druelle, Jacob Dietle, Joe Rhew, and Maja Voje wrote about building a GTM brain: your ICP, personas, and messaging as files your agents read, with one owner. Waxman put it simply: “AI isn’t your moat. Context is.” On June 12, Rhew called it: “Jan - Jun 2026: GTM Context.”

Now the vendors are bringing answers. ZoomInfo now calls GTM.AI “The Context Graph for your GTM AI.” Profound shipped Context Manager and calls it “the system of record for your marketing context.” HubSpot rebuilt its platform around Growth Context at UNBOUND. Salesforce leads its new AI harness with “Trusted Context.” Startups like Octave, Endgame, and Vasco are building context layers for revenue teams.

“Context” is very present in vendor positioning. It showed up in 10% of Dreamforce posts and 15% of UNBOUND posts. 38% of core GTM tech homepages use “context” in their messaging, and about one in six use it to describe what they sell.

That positioning angle is growing. On the core GTM homepages I could compare with Q1, “context” went from 26% to 37%. Salesforce, Profound, Attio, HubSpot, and Octave push it the hardest.

Context is king for agents. This is a battle to watch.

Last issue I wrote that CRM got interesting. I’m optimistic about both the startups and the incumbents in this space. It’s already a big, important category. I’d bet it gets bigger. The new class kept coming. Lightfield raised $47M. Zero raised a $10.3M seed to build “what comes after CRM.” Monaco bought Overlayy.

Then Dreamforce and UNBOUND took over the same week. Dreamforce went from 0.7% of the conversation in August to 3.9% in September. UNBOUND went from 0.3% to 1.5%.

Salesforce announced the kitchen sink. After collecting 2,856 posts about Dreamforce, my read was, “We need an agentic CRM just to keep track of all these names.” Add one more: KOA, Salesforce’s first in-house CRM reasoning model, now a model choice in Agentforce.

HubSpot focused on the marketer. It shipped a self-updating Smart CRM built on Growth Context, a Breeze Assistant that hands tasks to agents, and Marketing Studio for campaigns. It also said it’s the first CRM to integrate ChatGPT Ads. Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan launched their Loop book the same week. In my dataset, marketing craft showed up in 23% of UNBOUND posts and 4% of Dreamforce posts. Dreamforce was about AI. UNBOUND was about the marketer.

Last month I showed SaaSpocalypse talk at a low after Marc Benioff called it “nonsense.” It stayed down in September, at 1.4% of the conversation, well below its February peak of 3.7%. Headless talk rose from 7.3% in August to 7.8%.

The full readout below has the topic rankings, market and stage leaders, the founders who moved the conversation, and my read on the month’s acquisitions, funding deals, and launches.

Explore every topic, brand, and move.

The Topics index now measures 131 topics grouped into 25 curated clusters, plus 63 brand topics. The table ranks clusters and measured topics together. They are overlapping views of the market, not mutually exclusive buckets.

The two conferences and the model launches drove the biggest gains. Personal agents doubled. Below them, the fastest-growing topics were about what agents can reach: headless software, agent workflows, and agents that buy.

I track six market contests. Grouping is my framework; measurement is brand SOV. Here is who led each as of September 30.

For this table, each brand belongs to one market. Clay appears only in Orchestrators. Profound and AirOps appear only in AEO. The live Index allows overlapping membership.

Profound took the AEO lead from Semrush. Salesforce gained 8 points and HubSpot 5. Grok Bot entered the coding race at #4.

The stage table compares brands against peers with similar resources.

Scaled means public, 250+ employees, or $150M+ raised. Growth means 50–249 employees or $25M+ raised. Startup means under both Growth thresholds. Products inherit their parent’s stage. Open-source projects without a standalone operating company are excluded.

Funding and the conferences led the founder board. The biggest spikes came from founders announcing something new.

Engagement is likes, comments, and reposts. Response multiples compare each post with the author’s median response over the prior 90 days.

September’s GTM deals were small and specific. Point tools went into suites. As I wrote on Sept. 27, “If you run a GTM tech stack, be ready for more.”

HubSpot acqui-hired the Trigify team. Trigify built signal monitoring for warm outbound. The standalone product winds down, and most customers keep access until Oct. 22. The suites are getting broader and headless, and more teams can build a signal workflow themselves.
→ Read More: Max Mitcham, 803 engagements and an 18.2× spike | Trigify announcement

Superhuman acquired Fathom. The AI meeting notetaker now sits inside Superhuman’s email, calendar, and docs suite. Terms weren’t disclosed.
→ Read More: Richard White, 715 engagements and a 4× spike | Company announcement

Salesforce agreed to buy Listen Labs. Listen Labs’ agents recruit research participants, run the interviews, and write up what they found. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the deal hasn’t closed.
→ Read More: Salesforce, 1,034 engagements and a 15× spike | Company announcement

And more deals. Searchable bought Meridian, another AEO platform, the week after Profound’s raise. Monaco bought Overlayy, a Bengaluru sales-context startup. AB Tasty and VWO merged under one brand, Wingify. On Sept. 30, ZoomInfo bought DoubleO AI “to make AI agents reliable enough to run go-to-market motions.”
→ Read More: Chris Donnelly, 859 engagements | Anmol Chaman, 333 engagements and a 10.7× spike | Wingify announcement | Henry Schuck, 254 engagements | ZoomInfo announcement

The ten disclosed rounds in my September Moves ledger totaled $7.06B. Mistral and Cognition took 79%. Clay, Profound, Lightfield, and Firecrawl added up to $417M.

Profound raised $180M at a $1.8B valuation. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-led the Series D, seven months after its $96M Series C. Profound says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands.
→ Read More: James Cadwallader, 6,798 engagements and a 63.2× spike | Company announcement

Clay raised $115M at a $7.1B valuation. Wellington led the Series D. Clay says more than 17,000 teams build on it, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50. Two days later it launched a $1M community scholarship for GTM engineers.
→ Read More: Varun Anand, 4,284 engagements and a 10.7× spike | Company announcement

Lightfield raised $47M to build “the CRM for companies that run on agents.” a16z led the Series A. Six days later, Zero raised a $10.3M seed to build “what comes after CRM.”
→ Read More: Keith Peiris, 1,381 engagements and a 21.9× spike | Company announcement | Santtu Koivumäki, 1,311 engagements and a 17.2× spike

Firecrawl raised $75M for the GTM developer tools layer. Smash Capital led the Series B. The same day, it launched Alexandria, one API over 100+ data providers for AI agents.
→ Read More: Eric Ciarla, 39 engagements | Company announcement

The rest of the money went to models and code (GTM relevant, not core GTM tech). Mistral raised €3B (about $3.58B). Cognition, Devin’s parent, raised more than $2B at $48B. Temporal raised $550M at $12.55B, and Factory raised $200M at $5B.
→ Read More: Cognition | Mistral

The product story in September was the platforms opening up and the point tools renaming themselves.

Salesforce launched AIforce at Dreamforce. Slack, Claude, and Agentforce Coworker become front doors to Salesforce data. Four days earlier it named seven job-specific agents. The one sales teams will watch is Hunter, for outbound prospecting, in pilot until November with ZoomInfo, Demandbase, and Apollo data behind it.
→ Read More: Marc Benioff, 7,823 engagements and a 3.9× spike | Company announcement | Seven agents

HubSpot shipped a self-updating CRM and Marketing Studio at UNBOUND. Smart CRM updates records from calls, emails, and meetings.
→ Read More: Yamini Rangan, 891 engagements and a 2.6× spike | Company announcement | ChatGPT Ads

AiSDR relaunched as Ami, an AI GTM agent. On Sept. 4 I asked, “Is the ‘AI SDR’ idea dead?” Five days later an AI SDR company dropped “SDR” from its pitch. The AI SDR cluster lost 23% of its share in September and sits 46% below its Q2 average, while Revenue Agents rose 10%. Other outbound tools rebuilt themselves too. Apollo repositioned as an “AI GTM System.” Clay rebuilt Sequencer on Audiences. lemlist crossed $60M ARR, then rebranded around a modular outbound platform. I’m still seeing the top companies hire SDRs, not replace them. At least 70 of 197 leading AI and cloud companies had open SDR-team roles in mid-September.
→ Read More: Yuriy Zaremba, 1,617 engagements and a 36.8× spike | Charles Tenot, 773 engagements and a 5.1× spike

Phave came out of stealth. Marketo co-founder Jon Miller is rebuilding marketing automation around agents that reason instead of following rules. Twenty years after starting Marketo, he’s starting over in the same category.
→ Read More: Jon Miller, 1,268 engagements and an 11.4× spike | Company announcement

Ads showed up inside AI answers. OpenAI began testing Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT with select US advertisers. HubSpot integrated ChatGPT Ads. AirOps launched AI Ads to see and measure ads inside AI answers. Similarweb and NielsenIQ announced a way to measure sales driven by AI recommendations, due in Q4.
→ Read More: OpenAI announcement | AirOps announcement

I’m watching three things in October.

Do personal agents move from consumer hype into real sales and marketing work? Does the GTM funding wave keep going past Clay and Profound? And who wins the battle for GTM context: the platforms, the data providers, or the teams that build their own?

One follow-up from last month: August’s proof-of-human spike didn’t last. Proof of Human fell 72% in September.

The GTM Creator Index is live. Look yourself up and tell me who’s missing.

Explore the GTM Index

I logged 73 moves in September, with the source post and measured market response. The complete ledger is live in the Moves tab.

Explore the live Moves tab.