David Hammer spent six years at Google, working under Sundar Pichai and Marissa Mayer and creating products like DoubleClick Bid Manager, a digital advertising tool.
But after a successful tenure at the company, Hammer decided to strike out on his own, launching his own company for salespeople and securing $12 million in funding from investors like The New York Times, GV, and Canaan Partners.
“You won’t hear me say a negative thing about Google; it was a great place for me,” Hammer told Business Insider. “I think ultimately, part of [the decision to leave] was the recognition that what I wanted to build was a little bit harder to build at Google. We really believe on some level that the way to build this best would be outside of any traditional large company.”
Hammer started working on Emissary, a platform that connects salespeople with experts – called emissaries – who worked at major corporations like Samsung and Coca Cola. Those emissaries provide insight about their previous employers, like company culture, the key decision-makers within the company, and how the company typically makes important buying decisions.
Making the sales process less ‘exhausting’
Hammer said the idea for the company came to him while he was still working at Google, beginning with a central question: “What do we know that’s in people’s heads that sits outside of our organization? What do we not know?”
Up until now, Hammer says, the only way to get that type of information was by building personal relationships over time and trolling through LinkedIn to get access to the right people.
But with Emissary, Hammer says the process is much more streamlined and much less "exhausting." The company has built a hand-selected marketplace of more than 5,000 people that the company vets through its proprietary technology. Then, those people are matched with salespeople at organizations like tech firms and media companies.
"Our mission is that we think every B2B salesperson should be matching with an emissary and every emissary should be matched with a B2B salesperson," Hammer said.
The company publicly launched Monday and announced a $10 million Series A, led by Canaan Partners and G20 Ventures. Emissary's total funding is now at $12 million after a $2 million seed round with participation from GV - Google parent company Alphabet's venture arm - and The New York Times.