OpenMart Aims To Simplify Enterprise Sales To Local Businesses

In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, OhTea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea. She quickly realized how difficult it was to not only be able to locate all of the potential retailors but also to find the point of contact at each place.

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A Fragmented Market

The fragmented market was so hard to navigate, it ended up playing a role in the company’s demise. Wu told TechCrunch that ‘I failed to reach product market fit.’ It’s just very hard to find that retail information. I needed to pull from several tools, pull up a big spreadsheet and I thought maybe I should just solve my own pain point.’

The Birth of Openmart

That experience was the basis for the startup she co-founded three years later, Openmart. Openmart calls itself the AI alternative to Zoominfo. The company uses AI to scrape data from public business filings, maps, customer reviews and other sources to aggregate a database of local businesses organized by type.

A User-Friendly Solution

Users give Openmart a prompt of what kinds of businesses they are looking to sell to and the startup pulls them a list of potential sales leads with details like each business owners’ name and contact information. Wu founded the startup alongside Richard He, who she met while working at Pinterest as interns.

A Founding Story

The pair bonded over their dogs: Wu has a golden retriever while He has a lab. When He saw that Wu was thinking about starting a company, he wanted in. While the original idea sparked from Wu being unable to get her small side-hustle business into local business, the resulting mission behind Openmart looked a little different.

Focusing on Large Enterprises

He said they were doing research into this idea and discovered that large enterprises struggled to navigate selling to local businesses too and decided to focus on building a product for that group first. ‘Our core focus is still local business,’ He said, regarding the businesses Openmart’s database covers.

Confidence in AI Technology

We know it is a huge pain point. We are confident this AI agent can generate to all outbound sales as we grow into more sectors, not just physical business. AI in the first wave is not replacing lawyers or doctors, it’s more replacing lower intelligence, lower logical orders of reasoning tasks.’

Early Success and Funding

The company was founded late last year and was a member of Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. Openmart has already gained traction with large enterprises, with a number of high-profile clients on board.

Funding Round

Openmart recently raised $1 million in seed funding from investors including Founders Fund and Greylock Partners. The funding will be used to further develop the platform and expand its team.

Conclusion

The pain point of selling to local businesses is a real one, but Openmart has developed an innovative solution that uses AI to scrape data from public sources and provide users with valuable insights. With its early success and recent funding round, Openmart is well-positioned for growth and expansion in the coming years.