Ex-Sprinklr VPs Quit, Built Kris@Work in 7 Months: Three Sprinklr senior VPs walked away from high-paying roles, bet everything on agentic AI, and closed their first enterprise deal in seven months. Kris@Work, the AI-native Go-To-Market execution platform founded by Arun Singh, Ramakrishna Mallya, and Ananta Joshi, just raised $3 million in seed funding led by Infoedge Ventures, with participation from JN Capital & Growth Advisory (Singapore) and several angels.
The Bengaluru-based startup is building what founders call a “system-of-work and system-of-insights” — essentially, one platform to replace the 10+ SaaS tools GTM teams currently juggle.
This isn’t just another funding announcement. It’s a bet that SaaS is converging — and that revenue teams drowning in Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, Outreach, ZoomInfo, and ChurnZero will pay to consolidate everything into a single AI-powered work companion.
The Founding Story: From Sprinklr to Code in Under a Year
The Kris@Work founding team isn’t fresh out of college. They’re battle-tested SaaS operators:
- Arun Singh (CEO) — Senior VP at Sprinklr, built and scaled enterprise products
- Ramakrishna Mallya (CTO) — Senior VP at Sprinklr, led platform architecture
- Ananta Joshi (CPO) — Product leadership with deep UX/AI expertise
All three left Sprinklr with a thesis: execution platforms, not point tools, would define the next era of enterprise work. They founded Kris@Work in 2024, wrote their first line of code, and signed their first enterprise customer within seven months — a velocity that signals genuine demand, not just VC hype.
The Problem: SaaS Fatigue Is Real (And Expensive)
Here’s what the average revenue team deals with in 2026:
| Category | Tools Used | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CRM | Salesforce, HubSpot | $50–$150K |
| Sales Engagement | Outreach, SalesLoft, Apollo | $30–$80K |
| Conversation Intelligence | Gong, Chorus | $40–$100K |
| Data Enrichment | ZoomInfo, Clearbit, 6sense | $25–$75K |
| Customer Success | Gainsight, ChurnZero | $30–$80K |
| Revenue Operations | Clari, InsightSquared | $20–$60K |
| Support & Services | Zendesk, Intercom | $15–$50K |
| TOTAL | 10+ tools | $210K–$595K/year |
And that doesn’t include integration costs, training overhead, data silos, or “SaaS sprawl fatigue” — the phenomenon where teams stop using half their tools because context-switching kills productivity.
Kitty Agarwal, Partner at Infoedge Ventures, framed it perfectly: “Sales and Revenue teams today are overwhelmed by a proliferation of disconnected point solutions, leading to legacy SaaS fatigue and a measurable decline in productivity.”
The Solution: Agentic Architecture + Contextual AI
Kris@Work isn’t just consolidating workflows — it’s reimagining them with agentic architecture. Here’s what that means:
Traditional SaaS: You click through 10 tools, manually copy data, switch contexts constantly
Agentic AI SaaS: AI agents automate repetitive tasks, surface insights proactively, and orchestrate workflows across the platform
The platform unifies:
- Lead identification (replacing ZoomInfo, 6sense)
- Deal management (replacing Salesforce workflows)
- Account expansion (replacing Gainsight, ChurnZero)
- Real-time insights (replacing Gong, Clari)
- Governance & compliance (built-in)
All powered by contextual AI that understands your business, learns from your data, and guides teams in real-time — not just after-the-fact dashboards.
As CTO Ramakrishna Mallya put it: “Agentic architectures and context-aware AI are making platforms smarter and more unified. What once required multiple tools can now be achieved through a single platform, faster and with better results.”
The Market: Who’s Competing in Unified GTM Platforms?
Kris@Work is entering a fast-evolving category where established players are converging from different angles:
| Company | Approach | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | CRM expanding into everything | Ecosystem lock-in, brand trust | Bloated, slow, expensive |
| HubSpot | All-in-one for SMBs | Easy to use, affordable | Weak for enterprise complexity |
| Gong | Conversation intelligence expanding | Best-in-class call analysis | Still a point tool, not a platform |
| Clari | Revenue operations platform | Strong forecasting | Narrow use case |
| Kris@Work | AI-native unified platform | Agentic AI, built for convergence | Unproven, zero brand recognition |
The edge Kris@Work claims: Unlike Salesforce (built pre-AI) or HubSpot (built for SMBs), Kris@Work is AI-native from day one and designed specifically for enterprise GTM teams who need both power and simplicity.
The Customers: Early Traction Across Industries
Despite launching less than a year ago, Kris@Work is already being adopted in:
- Technology (SaaS companies, naturally)
- Financial Services (banks, fintechs)
- Telecom (complex enterprise sales cycles)
- Automotive (B2B suppliers, OEMs)
These industries share a common pain: complex GTM motions with fragmented tool stacks that create data silos and slow down revenue teams.
The fact that Kris@Work closed enterprise contracts in under seven months suggests product-market fit is real — enterprise sales cycles typically take 9–18 months, especially for unproven startups.
The Roadmap: Beyond GTM, Toward a Universal Execution Layer
Here’s where it gets ambitious. Over the next three years, Kris@Work plans to expand beyond GTM into other enterprise functions using the same AI-native framework.
Think about what that means: if the platform can unify sales, marketing, customer success, support, and revenue ops, why stop there? Finance, HR, procurement, legal — every enterprise function suffers from SaaS sprawl.
CPO Ananta Joshi’s vision: “Converging everything at work into a single intelligent window is how we see the future of work.”
That’s not just a GTM platform. That’s a play to become the operating system for enterprise work — a unified execution layer where AI agents handle repetitive tasks and humans focus on strategic decisions.
What the $3M Seed Will Fund
Kris@Work plans to deploy the fresh capital toward:
- Expanding enterprise customer base — more pilots, more case studies, more revenue
- Strengthening go-to-market partnerships — channel partners, system integrators, resellers
- Completing platform development — four phases planned, with focus on deeper automation, multi-agent orchestration, and enterprise-scale deployments
Translation: They’re past prototype. They’re in “scale and sell” mode.
The Risk: Can a 7-Month-Old Startup Beat Salesforce?
Let’s be honest: replacing Salesforce is hard. Enterprises don’t rip out CRMs lightly. The switching costs are enormous — data migration, retraining, workflow redesign, risk of disruption.
Kris@Work’s strategy seems to be land and expand:
- Start with one use case (e.g., sales engagement, customer success)
- Prove value with AI-powered insights and automation
- Gradually replace adjacent tools as trust builds
- Eventually become the system of record
This is the same playbook HubSpot used to fight Salesforce — start small, prove ROI, grow account-by-account.
The difference? HubSpot took 10+ years. Kris@Work is betting that agentic AI accelerates this timeline by delivering 10x value faster.
The Verdict: A Bold Bet on Convergence
The thesis is simple: SaaS is converging. Large language models and agentic AI make it possible to build unified platforms that replace dozens of point tools. Revenue teams are exhausted. Enterprises want consolidation.
If Kris@Work executes, they’re building the Salesforce + HubSpot + Gong + Gainsight killer — all in one, AI-native, designed for the 2026+ world.
If they don’t, they’ll be one of a dozen “unified GTM platforms” that raised seed rounds, got some traction, and got acquired by Salesforce.
The founders chose conviction over comfort. They walked away from Sprinklr. They built fast. They raised smart money. Now comes the hard part: selling enterprises on replacing their entire GTM stack with a 7-month-old startup.
For Indian SaaS founders and enterprise software builders, Kris@Work’s playbook is worth studying: deep domain expertise + speed to first customer + AI-native thesis = venture fundability, even in a tough market.
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